Digital Commons Network^™

Beginning Farmers: Will They Face Up To Safety And Health Hazards?, Louise Byler, Nancy Ellen Kiernan, Sam Steel, Patricia Neiner, Dennis J. Murphy

Journal of Extension

The study reported here assessed the farm safety and health training needs of beginning farmers in Pennsylvania to help educators develop training workshops and materials to meet those needs. Results of the online survey indicate that participants highly value farm safety, consider themselves to have mostly minimal to moderate skills relative to the safe operation of farms, and are willing to attend safety training workshops. The results of the study provide direction to Extension educators in designing farm safety and health training for this growing constituent group.

African-American Land Loss And Sustainable Forestry In The Southeast: An Analysis Of The Issues, Opportunities, And Gaps, Colmore S. Christian, Rory Fraser, Amadou Diop

Journal of Extension

African-Americans' connection to the land is rapidly disappearing, and with it goes the cultural, political, and socio-economic capital that has helped this population, especially in southern states. There has been a severe decline in black landownership since 1910, resulting in rural counties with predominantly black populations becoming pockets of enduring poverty. Judicious investments in efforts to solve black land loss may lead to solutions to a larger problem: engagement of non-industrial private forestland owners in sustainable land management. Strengthening black forest-based communities as places to invest and live can build on this rich Southern heritage.

Understanding The Long-Term Benefits Of A Latino Financial Literacy Education Program, Antonio Alba Meraz, Cindy M. Petersen, Mary S. Marczak, Arthur Brown, Neeraj Rajasekar

Journal of Extension

The long-term impact of a Latino financial literacy program was evaluated with a sample of relatively recent immigrant populations in southern Minnesota. Telephone and face-to-face interviews were conducted with participants 6 months post program completion. Results indicate that improvements in knowledge and skills were retained and that these learning were applied to make improvements in participants' financial situations. Participants acknowledged that more important than gaining knowledge was learning how to apply what they have learned. Implications for Extension are offered in terms of those factors that promoted the effectiveness of the financial literacy education.

Building Supportive Networks Among Agricultural Innovators Through A Symposium On Dryland Organic Farming, Julia Piaskowski, Bertie Weddell, E Patrick Fuerst, Diana Roberts, Lynne Carpenter-Boggs

Journal of Extension

Extension can play a valuable role by bringing together those who are pioneering innovative practices. We planned, built, and evaluated an Extension symposium on dryland organic agriculture. Post-symposium evaluations indicated that this process disseminated regionally relevant information; fostered networks among producers, researchers, and the organic processing and feed industries; enhanced trust among stakeholders; and increased interest in expanding organic production. Ninety-five percent of respondents indicated that they established new business relationships within 6 months of the symposium. A unique aspect of our project was the enhancement of social capital between geographically separated rural localities.

Demographic Factors Affecting The Adoption Of Multiple Value-Added Practices By Oklahoma Cow-Calf Producers, Brian R. Williams, Kellie Curry Raper, Eric A. Devuyst, Derrell Peel, C. P. Murphy, Chris Richards, Damona Doye

Journal of Extension

Value-added programs are continually promoted by Extension personnel as avenues for improving cow-calf profitability, but producer adoption of value-added practices lags in spite of research that validates the value of these practices. Identifying producer characteristics that increase the likelihood of value-added practice adoption is critical to developing successful outreach efforts. Results from a survey of Oklahoma beef producers on value-added practice adoption indicate that multiple demographic variables influence a producer's likelihood of practice adoption. For Extension specialists, results can help in targeting likely adopters and developing methods to overcome barriers to adoption by producers less likely to adopt.

Celebrating Joe's First 50 Years: A Public Good, Joan S. Thomson

Journal of Extension

Understanding our history provides insight to shape our vision of JOE's future. As we implement Extension's mission, defining our own personal philosophy is often overlooked. Instead, the focus is on the institution's policies, procedures, and practices. Extension's public good is derived from its engagement with communities. Such engagement requires a commitment among Extension's educators; this commitment must be grounded in understanding engaged scholarship, an evolving process to which JOE must contribute.

College Readiness For Rural Youth Initiative: Creating A Climate For Success, Jason Hedrick, Mark Light, Jeff Dick

Journal of Extension

College Readiness for Rural Youth is an innovative, postsecondary education bridge program that gives youth the opportunity to explore college attainability, admissions, financial aid, and application processes. The initiative aims to support academic success and transition to college for rural youth.

A Research Agenda For The Uae Ipad Initiative, Christina Gitsaki, Matthew A. Robby, Troy Priest, Khaled Hamdan, Yazid Ben-Chabane

All Works

The 2012-2013 academic year has seen the beginning of a national initiative in the United Arab Emirates to equip all students in federal universities/colleges with iPads, and to make use of this mobile device in teaching and learning. Within the context of this national initiative, each federal institution (Zayed University, UAE University and the Higher Colleges of Technology) has begun to implement iPads in its curriculum, and to gather data about this implementation to inform further development. In this paper, representatives of the three federal institutions map out the research approach which they are taking to investigate the progress of …

Seizing A Cell Phone Incident To Arrest: Data Extraction Devices, Faraday Bags, Or Aluminum Foil As A Solution To The Warrantless Cell Phone Search Problem, Adam M. Gershowitz

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Dense Image Correspondence Under Large Appearance Variations, Linlin Liu, Kok-Lim Low, Wen-Yan Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper addresses the difficult problem of finding dense correspondence across images with large appearance variations. Our method uses multiple feature samples at each pixel to deal with the appearance variations based on our observation that pre-defined single feature sample provides poor results in nearest neighbor matching. We apply the idea in a flow-based matching framework and utilize the best feature sample for each pixel to determine the flow field. We propose a novel energy function and use dual-layer loopy belief propagation to minimize it where the correspondence, the feature scale and rotation parameters are solved simultaneously. Our method is …

Determining The Feasibility Of Implementing An Effective Fungiculture Program With The Peace Garden At Illinois Wesleyan University, Mackenzie Rivkin '14

Outstanding Senior Seminar Papers

The Peace Garden at Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU), the organic garden at the small liberal-arts university in Bloomington, Illinois, is devoted to growing nutritious, pesticide-free food to be sold locally in an attempt to counterbalance the various food-related issues which stem from conventional food systems. Mushrooms, fungi with many nutritional benefits, are not currently produced by the Peace Garden. However, the unique nature of mushrooms may be attractive to certain consumers and could further contribute to the Peace Garden's mission if produced. This study, conducted September to December 2013 is guided by the following question: What is the feasibility of …

Exploiting Contextual Information For Prosodic Event Detection Using Auto-Context, Junhong Zhao, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Hua Yang, Michael T. Johnson, Jia Liu, Shanhong Xia

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Prosody and prosodic boundaries carry significant information regarding linguistics and paralinguistics and are important aspects of speech. In the field of prosodic event detection, many local acoustic features have been investigated; however, contextual information has not yet been thoroughly exploited. The most difficult aspect of this lies in learning the long-distance contextual dependencies effectively and efficiently. To address this problem, we introduce the use of an algorithm called auto-context. In this algorithm, a classifier is first trained based on a set of local acoustic features, after which the generated probabilities are used along with the local features as contextual information …

“Someone’S Got To Do It” – Primary Care Providers (Pcps) Describe Caring For Rural Women With Mental Health Problems, Maria C. Colon-Gonzalez, Jennifer S. Mccall-Hosenfeld, Carol S. Weisman, Marianne M. Hillemeier, Amanda N. Perry, Cynthia H. Chuang

School of Medicine Publications

Objective: Little is known about how primary care providers (PCPs) approach mental health care for low-income rural women. We developed a qualitative research study to explore the attitudes and practices of PCPs regarding the care of mood and anxiety disorders in rural women.

Method: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 family physicians, internists, and obstetrician-gynecologists (OBGYNs) in office-based practices in rural central Pennsylvania. Using thematic analysis, investigators developed a coding scheme. Questions focused on 1) screening and diagnosis of mental health conditions, 2) barriers to treatment among rural women, 3) management of mental illnesses in rural women, and 4) ideas …

Genetic Disruption Of Sod1 Gene Causes Glucose Intolerance And Impairs Β-Cell Function, Giovanna Muscogiuri, Adam B. Salmon, Cristina Aguayo-Mazzucato, Mengyao Li, Bogdan Balas, Rodolfo Guardado-Mendoza, Andrea Giaccari, Robert L. Reddick, Sara M. Reyna, Gordon Weir

School of Medicine Publications

Oxidative stress has been associated with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. However, it is not clear whether oxidative damage is a cause or a consequence of the metabolic abnormalities present in diabetic subjects. The goal of this study was to determine whether inducing oxidative damage through genetic ablation of superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) leads to abnormalities in glucose homeostasis. We studied SOD1-null mice and wild-type (WT) littermates. Glucose tolerance was evaluated with intraperitoneal glucose tolerance tests. Peripheral and hepatic insulin sensitivity was quantitated with the euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp. β-Cell function was determined with the hyperglycemic clamp and morphometric analysis of …

Apakah Kreativitas Dan Sikap Terhadap Ilmu Ekonomi Meramalkan Partisipasi Politik Mahasiswa? Peran Mediasi Efikasi Politik Pada Mahasiswa Di Malang, Jawa Timur, Juneman Abraham, Diantini Ida Viatre

Makara Human Behavior Studies in Asia

This research aims to find the psychological mechanism of students’ political participation. The research was designed with predictive correlational design and the data analysis technique was path analysis. The dependent variable was political participation intention. The predictor variables were creativity and students’ attitude toward economics. The mediator variables were the necessary political experience and political efficacy. One hundred and four students of Department of Psychology, FPPsi, Malang State University, participated (Mage = 19.50 years old; SDage = 2.397 years). The research found that creativity and attitude toward economics are significant predictors for students’ political participation intention and this prediction is …

Introduction To The 2013 Editors’ Symposium: The Status Of International Law And International Human Rights, Larry Alexander, Steven D. Smith

San Diego Law Review

The outstanding collection of articles following this Introduction constitutes the 2013 Editors’ Symposium of the San Diego Law Review. The Editors’ Symposium, an annual event, began with the 2004 Symposium, What Is Legal Interpretation?, which appeared in these pages in Volume 42. It was followed in 2005 by the Symposium, The Meaning of Marriage; in 2006 by the Symposium, The Rights and Wrongs of Discrimination; in 2007 by the Symposium, Informational Privacy: Philosophical Foundations and Legal Implications; in 2008 by the Symposium, National Borders and Immigration; in 2009 by the Symposium, Isaiah Berlin, Value Pluralism, and the Law; in 2010 …

The Morality Of Human Rights, Michael J. Perry

San Diego Law Review

My discussion of the morality of human rights in this Article presupposes that the reader is familiar with the internationalization of human rights: the growing international recognition and protection, in the period since the end of the Second World War, of certain rights as human rights. The Appendix to this Article is for readers not familiar with the internationalization of human rights. I begin, in the first Part of the Article, by explaining what the term human right means in the context of the internationalization of human rights. I also explain both the sense in which some human rights are, …

The Limits Of Custom In Constitutional And International Law, Michael D. Ramsey

San Diego Law Review

This Article does not contend that arguments for extension of custom are illegitimate. Instead, it makes two more limited claims. First, there is an important difference between arguments from pure custom and arguments for the extension of custom, with the latter being more properly called common law arguments. Second, the legitimacy of common law arguments in some fields, especially constitutional law and international law, is substantially more problematic than the legitimacy of arguments from pure custom. The Article develops as follows. Part II sets out in greater detail the proposed distinction between arguments from pure custom and arguments for extension …

Shame, Memory, And The Unspeakable: The International Criminal Court As Damnatio Memoriae, Michael Blake

San Diego Law Review

The first [part] will discuss two ways of looking at the court and why the conventional justifications of punishment might not be adequate to justify what the court is doing. The second will examine the issue of the politically unspeakable and argue that the court’s mandate might indeed be the responsibility of making certain ideas and persons politically shameful. The final Part will try to give some justification for the claim that this mandate might give rise to a justification for the court’s existence. On the account I provide here, even if the court could not be justified with reference …

Does The Existing Human Rights Regime Have Political Authority?, Christopher Heath Wellman

San Diego Law Review

In this Article I consider whether the existing international legal human rights regime enjoys political authority over sovereign states. In particular, I explore whether, just as states can cite their role as the primary institutions that protect human rights in order to justify their claim to authority over their citizens, perhaps the current human rights regime might plausibly cite its secondary role in securing human rights in order to ground its authority over these states.

Achieving The Dream: Extending Immigration Reform To Administrative Case Closure, Tory E. Smith

San Diego Law Review

This Comment compares DACA to administrative case closure and argues that Congress or the President should grant employment authorization to individuals whose cases have been administratively closed. Part I describes the current interpretation of the employment authorization regulation and provides the background of administrative case closure. Part I highlights the disparate treatment that the regulation affords to undocumented immigrants facing deferred action and administrative closure—offering employment authorization to only deferred action recipients. Part II examines the history of deferred action in immigration cases and uses DACA as a framework to show how the scope of the employment authorization regulation should …

A Shrouded Remedy: Increasing Transparency In The Irs Advance Pricing And Mutual Agreement Program By Releasing Redacted Advance Pricing Agreements And Increasing Administrative Disclosures, Blake L. Currey

San Diego Law Review

This Comment examines the current state of the IRS’s handling of pricing agreements within the APMA Program, arguing that the IRS should improve the Program by increasing its transparency to coincide with the additional resources being devoted to the Program, the IRS’s elevating transfer pricing enforcement, and the modern valuation challenges in transfer pricing. Part II further introduces transfer pricing and the arm’s length standard, and Part III examines the recent performance of the APMA Program. Part IV explores the Program’s troubling lack of transparency. Part V analyzes the legal and financial interests implicated by improving the Program’s transparency, arguing …

Transfer-Free Growth Of Graphene On Sio2 Insulator Substrate From Sputtered Carbon And Nickel Films, Genhua Pan, Bing Li, Mark Heath, David Horsell, M. Lesley Wears, La Taan, Shakil Awan

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Anti-Cancer Effects Of Garcinol In Pancreatic Cancer Transgenic Mouse Model, Nadia Saadat

Wayne State University Dissertations

Adenocarcinoma of pancreas is recognized for its poor prognosis, as it progresses asymptomatically and is rarely diagnosed at early stage. According to American cancer society pancreatic cancer, it has lowest survival rate in all cancer types, with less than 6% five year survival rate. Surgical resection is only possible for 20% of diagnosed cases and current chemotherapy has only 15% response rate. Even the most favored drug, Gemcitabine, increases survival time only by a few months, depending on the stage at diagnosis. Some bioactive food components or nutraceuticals have shown chemopreventive and chemotherapeutic effects without added side effects. Garcinol is …

Adjust Decision-Making Targets Based On Psychological Thresholds, Jian Liu, Shun Xiang Wu, Si Feng Liu, Qiao Wang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper study the impact of psychological thresholds (PTs) on the decision maker's (DM's) decision target when making decision. A new approach of decision making is proposed in this paper. First, we construct criterion expected functions according to three different types of criteria: profit type, cost-type and intermediate-type, respectively. Then, we calculate the local degree of satisfaction (LDS) of each object when PTs exists, in order to adjust the initial decision target to make up new decision table. Later, by weighting the criteria reaching the DM's degree of satisfaction (DS) along with information aggregation algorithm, we obtain the overall satisfaction …

Decision Trees To Model The Impact Of Disruption And Recovery In Supply Chain Networks, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, L. Wenbin, Xiuju Fu, Xiaofeng Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, Rick S. M. Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Increase in the frequency of disruptions in the recent times and their impact have increased the attention in supply chain disruption management research. The objective of this paper is to understand as to how a disruption might affect the supply chain network - depending upon the network structure, the node that is disrupted, the disruption in production capacity of the disrupted node and the period of the disruption - via decision trees. To this end, we first developed a 5-tier agent-based supply chain model and then simulated it for various what-if disruptive scenarios for 3 different network structures (80 trials …

An Mpi-Enabled Mapreduce Framework For Molecular Dynamics Simulation Applications, Shuju Bai, Ebrahim Khosravi, Seung Jong Park

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Computational technologies have been extensively investigated to be applied into many application domains. Since the presence of Hadoop, an implementation of MapReduce framework, scientists have applied it to biological sciences, chemistry, medical sciences, and other areas to efficiently process huge data sets. Although Hadoop is fault-tolerant and processes data in parallel, it does not support MPI in computing. The Map/Reduce tasks in Hadoop have to be serial, which results in inefficient scientific computations wrapped in Map/Reduce tasks. In the real world, many applications require MPI techniques due to their nature. Molecular dynamics simulation is one of them. In our research, …

A Hadoop Approach To Advanced Sampling Algorithms In Molecular Dynamics Simulation On Cloud Computing, Jin Niu, Shuju Bai, Ebrahim Khosravi, Seung Jong Park

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Cloud computing has emerged as a prevalent computing paradigm with the advantages of virtualization, scalability, fault tolerance, and a usage-based pricing model. It has been widely used in various computational research fields. Replica exchange molecular dynamics (REMD) and replica exchange statistical temperature molecular dynamics (RESTMD) are two sampling algorithms in molecular dynamics. Due to the inherent parallel feature of REMD and RESTMD, it is practical to convert them into cloud computing applications. However, the performance of REMD and RESTMD on clouds has not been extensively investigated. In our work, we implemented REMD and RESTMD in cloud computing environment through Hadoop, …

Afcd: An Approximated-Fair And Controlled-Delay Queuing For High Speed Networks, Lin Xue, Suman Kumar, Cheng Cui, Praveenkumar Kondikoppa, Chui Hui Chiu, Seung Jong Park

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

High speed networks have characteristics of high bandwidth, long queuing delay, and high burstiness which make it difficult to address issues such as fairness, low queuing delay and high link utilization. Current high-speed networks carry heterogeneous TCP flows which makes it even more challenging to address these issues. Since sender centric approaches do not meet these challenges, there have been several proposals to address them at router level via queue management (QM) schemes. These QM schemes have been fairly successful in addressing either fairness issues or large queuing delay but not both at the same time. We propose a new …

Relative Value Iteration For Average Reward Semi-Markov Control Via Simulation, Abhijit Gosavi

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper studies the semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) under the long-run average reward criterion in the simulation-based context. Using dynamic programming, a straightforward approach for solving this problem involves policy iteration; a value iteration approach for this problem involves a transformation that induces an additional computational burden. In the simulation-based context, however, where one seeks to avoid the transition probabilities needed in dynamic programming, value iteration forms a more convenient route for solution purposes. In this paper, hence, we present (to the best of knowledge for the first time) a relative value iteration algorithm for solving average reward SMDPs via …