Digital Commons Network^™

Pharmacological Modulation Of Nad Alters Tnf-Α Responses In Macrophage Subsets, A Al-Shabany, Aj Moody, Ad Foey, Ra Billington

School of Biological and Marine Sciences

No abstract provided.

The Antibacterial Effects Of Silver, Titanium Dioxide And Silica Dioxide Nanoparticles Compared To The Dental Disinfectant Chlorhexidine On Streptococcus Mutans Using A Suite Of Bioassays., Alexandros Besinis, Peralta T De, Richard D. Handy

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

Metal-containing nanomaterials have the potential to be used in dentistry for infection control, but little is known about their antibacterial properties. This study investigated the toxicity of silver (Ag), titanium dioxide and silica nanoparticles (NPs) against the oral pathogenic species of Streptococcus mutans, compared to the routine disinfectant, chlorhexidine. The bacteria were assessed using the minimum inhibitory concentration assay for growth, fluorescent staining for live/dead cells, and measurements of lactate. All the assays showed that Ag NPs had the strongest antibacterial activity of the NPs tested, with bacterial growth also being 25-fold lower than that in chlorhexidine. The survival rate …

Wave Farm Impact On The Beach Profile: A Case Study, J. Abanades, D. Greaves, G. Iglesias

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Application Of A Novel Decision Support System To Assess And Manage Coastal Flood Risk In The Teign Estuary, Uk., Santamaria R Gonzalez, D Simmonds, B Zanuttigh, D Reeve, R Nicholls, R Thompson, S Pan, J Horrillo-Caraballo, S Hoggart, S Hanson, E Penning-Rowsell, A Fox, M Hanley

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

This paper demonstrates the application of a Decision Support System (DSS) developed for decision makers and stakeholders to manage and raise awareness of coastal flood risk. The DSS is a GIS-based framework that predicts flooding consequences and is structured around the Source Pathway Receptor Consequence (SPRC) model. The DSS draws together points of view from engineering, ecology and socio-economics, allowing the comparative assessment of the consequences of a range of management interventions. The utility of the tool is demonstrated through application to an estuary field site - the Teign estuary in UK. Vulnerability maps, generated by the DSS for pre-set …

Coastal Defence Through Wave Farms, J. Abanades, D. Greaves, G. Iglesias

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

The possibility of using wave farms for coastal defence warrants investigation because wave energy is poised to become a major renewable in many countries over the next decades. The fundamental question in this regard is whether a wave farm can be used to reduce beach erosion under storm conditions. If the answer to this question is positive, then a wave farm can have coastal defence as a subsidiary function, in addition to its primary role of producing carbon-free energy. The objective of this work is to address this question by comparing the response of a beach in the face of …

Critical Exponents Of The 3d Ising And Related Models From Conformal Bootstrap, Ferdinando Gliozzi, Antonio Rago

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Rogue Waves In Opposite Currents: An Experimental Study On Deterministic And Stochastic Wave Trains, A Toffoli, T Waseda, H Houtani, L Cavaleri, Dm Greaves, M Onorato

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Self-Regulating Smoking And Snacking Through Physical Activity., Hwajung Oh, Adrian H. Taylor

Peninsula Medical School

OBJECTIVE: Emotional snacking contributes to weight gain after smoking cessation. Exercise acutely reduces cravings for cigarettes and snack food. This study examined if different exercise intensities acutely reduces snack and cigarette cravings and attentional bias (AB) to video clips of snacks and cigarettes among abstinent smokers. METHODS: Abstinent smokers (and snackers; N = 23) randomly did 15 mins of moderate and vigorous cycling and a passive control in a cross-over design. Visual initial AB (IAB) and maintained AB (MAB) were assessed pre- and after treatment while watching paired snacking/neutral or smoking/neutral video clips. Desire to snack and smoke were assessed …

Assessing The Relationship Between Eating Disorder Psychopathology And Autistic Traits In A Non-Clinical Adult Population, Amelia Myri Carton, Alastair D. Smith

School of Psychology

No abstract provided.

Practical Use Of Computational Fluid Dynamics (Cfd) In Improving The Efficiency Of Domestic Ventilation Waste Heat Recovery Systems, Adam Kyte

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Semantic-Based Publish/Subscribe System In Social Network, Farzana Jahan

Computer Science

The publish/subscribe model has become a prevalent paradigm for building distributed notification services by decoupling the publishers and the subscribers from each other. The semantics-based publish/subscribe system allows highly expressive descriptions of subscriptions and publications and thus is more appropriate for content dissemination when a finer level of granularity is necessary. In this paper we have designed and implemented a semantic-based publish/subscribe system that can be adapted into social networks where thousands of people can share their common interests through publications and subscriptions. We have described our ontology, defined publishers’ and subscribers’ data semantics or schema, provided a matching algorithm, …

Implementation Of A Clonal Selection Algorithm, Srikanth Valluru

Computer Science

Some of the best optimization solutions were inspired by nature. Clonal selection algorithm is a technique that was inspired from genetic behavior of the immune system, and is widely implemented in the scientific and engineering fields. The clonal selection algorithm is a population-based search algorithm describing the immune response to antibodies by generating more cells that identify these antibodies, increasing its affinity when subjected to some internal process. In this paper, we have implemented the artificial immune network using the clonal selection principle within the optimal lab system. The basic working of the algorithm is to consider the individuals of …

A Restful Architecture For Multiuser Virtual Environments And Simulations, Matti Kariluoma

Computer Science

JavaMOO is an architecture for creating multiuser virtual environments using the MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) and MOO (MUD Object Oriented) design patterns (rooms and objects in the rooms, including \exit" objects that lead to other rooms). The MOO design pattern traces it roots back to the rst multiuser virtual environments in the early 1980s. The focus of this thesis is joining the MOO design pattern with a distributed architecture. A distributed architecture is pursued to reduce the per-server computational load, compared to a traditional single-server approach. The e ect of transferring computational load to the client software is also investigated, with …

An Interactive Visualization System For A Multi-Level View Of Opinion Mining Results, Karan Chitkara

Computer Science

Products are purchased and sold on a daily basis and people tend to critique on products they purchase. Those who want to buy a product will read reviews on that product given by others before buying; likewise those who have already bought a product will write a review on it. This paper presents a technique for visualizing data that comes from reviews given online for different products. My contribution to this project is to create a tool and process the tagged files generated with the help of machine learning. This project also focuses on the implementation of Semantic matching which …

Best Practices Of Erp Implementation, Rahul Puri

Computer Science

Today Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has become a fundamental necessity for the organization. It serves many functional areas and many industries in an integrated fashion, trying to automate operations from inventory control, supply chain management, sales support, manufacturing production as well as scheduling, financial accounting and cost accounting, customer relationship management and human resources. However, successful implementation and deployment of ERP systems is a challenging task which when not executed successfully will not serve the purpose for which it is being implemented. The objective of the study is to examine and analyze the best practices that have to be adopted …

Investigating Women's Experiences Of Asthma Care In Pregnancy: A Qualitative Study., Chervonne Chamberlain, Graham R. Williamson, Beatrice Knight, Mark Daly, David M.G. Halpin

School of Nursing and Midwifery

Background : Most asthmatic women have normal pregnancies and complications are infrequent when their asthma is well-controlled. Symptom control and medical treatment are concerning to pregnant asthma suffers, as is the impact that their illness and treatment might have on their unborn baby. The aim was to investigate in a qualitative study the thoughts and feelings of women's experiences of asthma in pregnancy. Twenty-two women with asthma who had a pregnancy within two years were asked to participate. Seven women were interviewed when data saturation was achieved. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using the 'Framework' Method, independently analysed by two …

Development Of Australian Clinical Practice Outcome Standards For Graduates Of Critical Care Nurse Education, F Gill, G Leslie, G Grech, D Boldy, J Latour

School of Nursing and Midwifery

No abstract provided.

Improved Genetic Programming Techniques For Data Classification, Naila Shikri Al-Madi

Computer Science

Evolutionary algorithms are one category of optimization techniques that are inspired by processes of biological evolution. Evolutionary computation is applied to many domains and one of the most important is data mining. Data mining is a relatively broad field that deals with the automatic knowledge discovery from databases and it is one of the most developed fields in the area of artificial intelligence. Classification is a data mining method that assigns items in a collection to target classes with the goal to accurately predict the target class for each item in the data. Genetic programming (GP) is one of the …

A New Coupling Metric: Combining Structural And Semantic Relationships, Mamdouh Khalaf Alenezi

Computer Science

Maintaining object-oriented software is problematic and expensive. Earlier research has revealed that complex relationships among object-oriented software entities are key reasons that make maintenance costly. Therefore, measuring the strength of these relationships has become a requirement to develop proficient techniques for software maintenance. Coupling, a measure of the interdependence among software entities, is an important property for which many software metrics have been defined. It is widely agreed that the level of coupling in a software product has consequences for its maintenance. In order to understand which aspects of coupling affect quality or other external attributes of software, this dissertation …

Metrics And Tools To Guide Design Of Graphical User Interfaces, Khalid Ali Alemerien

Computer Science

User interface design metrics assist developers evaluate interface designs in early phase before delivering the software to end users. This dissertation presents a metric-based tool called GUIEvaluator for evaluating the complexity of the user interface based on its structure. The metrics-model consists of five modified structural measures of interface complexity: Alignment, grouping, size, density, and balance. The results of GUIEvaluator are discussed in comparison with the subjective evaluations of interface layouts and the existing complexity metrics-models. To extend this metrics-model, the Screen-Layout Cohesion (SLC) metric has been proposed. This metric is used to evaluate the usability of user interfaces. The …

Simple Identity Manager, Sunil Kolluru

Computer Science

Identity management is a key area for any enterprise. Maintaining user profiles, including e-mail, passwords, and other personal information, and providing a way to manage them is ubiquitous for any company. Specifically, one could not rule out the necessity of basic operations, such as creating a user profile, modifying it, changing the password, finding/resetting a forgotten password, finding a forgotten userID, and enabling/disabling a user account. Identity management is observed on any website that needs credentials to login. Companies are investing millions of dollars in identity management products because, the corporations are aware that it is inevitable. This paper presents …

Hydroxyapatite, Fluor-Hydroxyapatite And Fluorapatite Produced Via The Sol–Gel Method: Dissolution Behaviour And Biological Properties After Crystallisation, Cj Tredwin, Am Young, Ea Abou Neel, G Georgiou, Jc Knowles

Peninsula Dental School

Hydroxyapatite (HA), fluor-hydroxyapatite (FHA) with varying levels of fluoride ion substitution and fluorapatite (FA) were synthesised by the sol-gel method as possible implant coating or bone-grafting materials. Calcium nitrate and triethyl phosphite were used as precursors under an ethanol-water based solution. Different amounts of ammonium fluoride were incorporated for the preparation of the FHA and FA sol-gels. After heating and powdering the sol-gels, dissolution behaviour was assessed using ion chromatography to measure Ca(2+) and PO4 (3-) ion release. Biological behaviour was assessed using cellular proliferation with human osteosarcoma cells and alamarBlue™ assay. Statistical analysis was performed with a two way …

Disposable Platform Provides Visual And Color-Based Point-Of-Care Anemia Self-Testing, Erika A. Tyburski, Scott E. Gillespie, William A. Stoy, Robert G. Mannino, Alexander J. Weiss, Alexa F. Siu, Rayford H. Bulloch, Karthik Thota, Anyela Cardenas, Wilena Session, Hanna J. Khoury, Siobhán O'Connor, Silvia T. Bunting, Jeanne Boudreaux, Craig R. Forest, Manila Gaddh, Traci Leong, L. Andrew Lyon, Wilbur A. Lam

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Anemia, or low blood hemoglobin (Hgb) levels, afflicts 2 billion people worldwide. Currently, Hgb levels are typically measured from blood samples using hematology analyzers, which are housed in hospitals, clinics, or commercial laboratories and require skilled technicians to operate. A reliable, inexpensive point-of-care (POC) Hgb test would enable cost-effective anemia screening and chronically anemic patients to self-monitor their disease. We present a rapid, standalone, and disposable POC anemia test that, via a single drop of blood, outputs color-based visual results that correlate with Hgb levels.

METHODS. We tested blood from 238 pediatric and adult patients with anemia of varying …

Form Factor Of Pnipam Microgels In Overpacked States, U. Gasser, J. S. Hyatt, J.- J. Lietor-Santos, E. S. Herman, L. Andrew Lyon, A. Fernandez-Nieves

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

We study the form factor of thermoresponsive microgels based on poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) at high generalized volume fractions, ζ, where the particles must shrink or interpenetrate to fit into the available space. Small-angle neutron scattering with contrast matching techniques is used to determine the particle form factor. We find that the particle size is constant up to a volume fraction roughly between random close packing and space filling. Beyond this point, the particle size decreases with increasing particle concentration; this decrease is found to occur with little interpenetration. Noteworthily, the suspensions remain liquid-like for ζ larger than 1, emphasizing the importance of …

Weekly Gridded Aquarius L-Band Radiometer/Scatterometer Observations And Salinity Retrievals Over The Polar Regions - Part 2: Initial Product Analysis, L. Brucker, Emmanuel P. Dinnat, L. S. Koenig

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Following the development and availability of Aquarius weekly polar-gridded products, this study presents the spatial and temporal radiometer and scatterometer observations at L band (frequency similar to 1.4 GHz) over the cryosphere including the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea ice in both hemispheres, and over sub-Arctic land for monitoring the soil freeze/thaw state. We provide multiple examples of scientific applications for the L-band data over the cryosphere. For example, we show that over the Greenland Ice Sheet, the unusual 2012 melt event lead to an L-band brightness temperature (TB) sustained decrease of similar to 5K at horizontal polarization. Over …

Zn(Ii) And Cu(Ii) Adsorption And Retention Onto Iron Oxyhydroxide Nanoparticles: Effects Of Particle Aggregation And Salinity, Rebecca B. Chesne, Christopher S. Kim

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Background: Iron oxyhydroxides are commonly found in natural aqueous systems as nanoscale particles, where they can act as effective sorbents for dissolved metals due to their natural surface reactivity, small size and high surface area. These properties make nanoscale iron oxyhydroxides a relevant option for the remediation of water supplies contaminated with dissolved metals. However, natural geochemical processes, such as changes in ionic strength, pH, and temperature, can cause these particles to aggregate, thus affecting their sorption capabilities and remediation potential. Other environmental parameters such as increasing salinity may also impact metal retention, e. g. when particles are transported …

Closing The Knowing-Doing Gap In Invasive Plant Management: Accessibility And Interdisciplinarity Of Scientific Research, Virginia Matzek, Justin Covino, Jennifer L. Funk, Martin Saunders

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Like many conservation disciplines, invasion biology may suffer from a knowing-doing gap, where scientific research fails to inform management actions. We surveyed California resource managers to evaluate engagement with scientific research and to identify research priorities. We examined managers' access to information, judgment of the usefulness of existing research, ability to generate scientific information, and priorities for future research. We found that practitioners rely on their own experience, and largely do not read the peer-reviewed literature, which they regard as only moderately useful. Less than half of managers who do research carry out experiments conforming to the norms of hypothesis …

Regional Dust Storm Modeling For Health Services: The Case Of Valley Fever, William A. Sprigg, Slobodan Nickovic, John N. Galgiani, Goran Pejanovic, Slavo Petkovic, Mirjam Vujadinovic, Ana Vukovic, Milan Dacic, Scott Dibiase, Anup K. Prasad, Hesham El-Askary

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

On 5 July 2011, a massive dust storm struck Phoenix, Arizona (USA), raising concerns for increased cases of valley fever (coccidioidomycosis, or, cocci). A quasi-operational experimental airborne dust forecast system predicted the event and provides model output for continuing analysis in collaboration with public health and air quality communities. An objective of this collaboration was to see if a signal in cases of valley fever in the region could be detected and traced to the storm - an American haboob. To better understand the atmospheric life cycle of cocci spores, the DREAM dust model (also herein, NMME-DREAM) was modified to …

Connecting Model Species To Nature: Predator-Induced Long-Term Sensitization In Aplysia Californica, Maria J. Mason, Amanda J. Watkins, Jordann Wakabayashi, Jennifer Buechler, Christine Pepino, Michelle Brown, William G. Wright

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Previous research on sensitization in Aplysia was based entirely on unnatural noxious stimuli, usually electric shock, until our laboratory found that a natural noxious stimulus, a single sublethal lobster attack, causes short-term sensitization. We here extend that finding by demonstrating that multiple lobster attacks induce long-term sensitization (>= 24 h) as well as similar, although not identical, neuronal correlates as observed after electric shock. Together these findings establish long-and short-term sensitization caused by sublethal predator attack as a natural equivalent to sensitization caused by artificial stimuli.

An Exploration Of The Creation And Maintenance Of Local Voluntary Organizations Active In Disaster, James Daniel Jorissen

Emergency Management

This study sought to explore the factors that influence the creation and maintenance of Local Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (LVOADs). Semistructured interviews were conducted and data was analyzed following the principles of Grounded Theory as outlined by Charmaz (2006). Seventeen individuals were selected based on their involvement in five LVOADs within FEMA’s Region VIII. It was found that creation factors held a high degree of consistency LVOAD-to-LVOAD, but the maintenance factors suffered from a limited number of available LVOADs that progressed to the maintenance stage. Findings suggest communities require multiple hazard events, strong leadership, and a formal organizational structure …