Digital Commons Network^™

Equal Access In Cyberspace: On Bridging The Digital Divide In Public Accommodations Coverage Through Amendment To The Americans With Disabilities Act, Laura Wolk

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note will proceed in three Parts. Part I will trace the development of the case law on this issue, which has culminated in a circuit split. It will also discuss the influence of the Department of Justice (DOJ), which has not exercised its regulatory authority on the subject but which has initiated enforcement actions consistent with an interpretation that includes freestanding websites. Part II will argue, based on the text, congressional silence, and the statute’s dual principal purposes, that private commercial websites do not fall within the purview of Title III. Part III will propose that disability rights advocates …

Evaluating The Impact Of Pharmacist Health Education On The Perceptions Of The Pharmacist’S Role Among Women Living In A Homeless Shelter, Laura V. Tsu, Kelsey Buckley, Sarah Nguyen, Jennifer Kohn

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Objectives: To determine the impact of pharmacist-provided educational seminars on the participant’s perception of the pharmacist’s role in providing women’s health education. Secondary objectives include the participant’s level of perceived benefit from the information provided during each presentation, as well as determining characteristics of participants who are interested in attending seminars.

Methods: This is a prospective study conducted within a homeless women’s shelter in Phoenix, Arizona. Pharmacists and pharmacy students provided 10 monthly educational seminars on topics related to women’s health. Participants completed a pre- and post-seminar survey regarding their perceptions of the presentations and pharmacists.

Results: …

Cycles Of Life, Henry Jake Foreman

Architecture and Planning ETDs

Engaging storytelling is both the means and medium of Cycles of Life(COL). This thesis project consists of a video documentary and curriculum magazine that highlights the visioning process, implementation, and cyclical design of this transformative learning model. Throughout the COL co-creative process, students collectively utilize Indigenous research methodologies to examine innovations in planning, design and education from diverse sources including guest speakers, social media, and contextual multi-sensory experiences. Incorporated into the COL curriculum is a regenerative process where students vision their own curriculum model that impacts health, education, planning and design. It is my hope that these seed projects will …

Paratransgenic Control Of Pierce's Disease, Arinder K. Arora

Biology ETDs

Pierce's Disease (PD) is a deadly grapevine disease, which is caused by a Gram negative bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa and transmitted by leafhoppers commonly known as sharpshooters, including the glassy-winged sharpshooter (GWSS, Homalodisca vitripennis). We developed paratransgenic control of PD using a commensal bacterium Pantoea agglomerans E325. The GWSSs acquired enhanced green fluorescent (EGFP)-expressing P. agglomerans from an artificial feeding system and the bacteria persisted within the insect foregut for two weeks. P. agglomerans was selected as the paratransgenic control agent based on its persistence within the sharpshooter foregut, a niche also inhabited by X. fastidiosa. P. agglomerans lines secreting two …

The Impact Of Temperature, Ph And Environmental Heterogeneity On Prokaryotic Diversity In Yellowstone National Park Thermal Springs, Xiaoben Jiang

Biology ETDs

Yellowstone National Park (YNP) is one of the largest and most diverse hydrothermal areas on Earth. Extensive culture-independent studies in YNP thermal springs have shown dramatic taxonomic and metabolic diversity in microbial communities. We conducted a survey of bacterial communities along temperature gradients in three alkaline springs with similar geochemistries at the local scale. With these data, we investigated the influence of environmental variables on bacterial community diversity and assemblages along a broad temperature range using high throughput 454 pyrosequencing. Previous studies have suggested that pH is the driver of microbial diversity in thermal springs among geographical regions or at …

R-Ketorolac Targets Cdc42 And Rac1 And Alters Ovarian Cancer Behaviors Critical For Invasion And Metastasis, Yuna Guo

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Cdc42 (cell division control protein 42) and Rac1 (Ras-related C3 botulinum) are attractive therapeutic targets in ovarian cancer based on their established importance in tumor cell migration, adhesion and invasion. Despite a predicted benefit, targeting GTPases has not yet been translated to clinical practice. Based on lead identification through high-throughput screening and computational shape homology approaches, R-ketorolac is identified as a Cdc42 and Rac1 regulator, an activity that is distinct from the anti-inflammatory, cyclooxygenase inhibitory activity of S-ketorolac. In this dissertation, R-ketorolac is established as an allosteric inhibitor of Cdc42 and Rac1. Studies on immortalized human ovarian adenocarcinoma cells (SKOV3ip), …

Apolipoprotein B Containing Lipoproteins Contribute To Host Innate Immune Pulmonary Defense Against Staphylococcus Aureus, Brett Manifold-Wheeler

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Circulating lipoproteins are increasingly recognized as innate immune effector molecules. Severe hypolipidemia, which may occur with trauma or critical illness, is clinically associated with bacterial pneumonia. Importantly, pneumonia caused by Staphylococcus aureus is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in both hospital- and community-acquired pneumonia cases. Here we report that lipoprotein deficiency impairs early pulmonary innate defense against S. aureus quorum-sensing dependent pathogenesis. Specifically, apoB levels in the lung early post-infection are significantly reduced with lipoprotein deficiency, coinciding with impaired host control of S. aureus agr-signaling and increased agr-dependent morbidity and inflammation. Given that lipoproteins also inhibit LTA- and …

Coordinated Persuasion With Dynamic Group Formation For Collaborative Elderly Care, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ageing in place demands a new paradigm of inhouse caregiving allowing many aspects of daily lives to be tackled by smart appliances and technologies. The important challenges include the effective provision of recommendations by multiple parties of caregiver constituting changes of the user's behavior. In this multiagent environment, interdependencies between agents become major issues to tackle. This paper presents an approach of dynamic group formation for autonomous caregiving agents to collaborate in recommending different aspects of well-being. The approach supports the agents to regulate the timing of their recommendations, prevent conflicting messages, and cooperate to make more effective persuasions. A …

Progressive Sequence Matching For Adl Plan Recommendation, Shan Gao, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) are indicatives of a person’s lifestyle. In particular, daily ADL routines closely relate to a person’s well-being. With the objective of promoting active lifestyles, this paper presents an agent system that provides recommendations of suitable ADL plans (i.e., selected ADL sequences) to individual users based on the more active lifestyles of the others. Specifically, we develop a set of quantitative measures, named wellness scores, spanning the evaluation across the physical, cognitive, emotion, and social aspects based on his or her ADL routines. Then we propose an ADL sequence learning model, named Recommendation ADL ART, or …

Modeling Social Media Content With Word Vectors For Recommendation, Ying Ding, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In social media, recommender systems are becoming more and more important. Different techniques have been designed for recommendations under various scenarios, but many of them do not use user-generated content, which potentially reflects users’ opinions and interests. Although a few studies have tried to combine user-generated content with rating or adoption data, they mostly reply on lexical similarity to calculate textual similarity. However, in social media, a diverse range of words is used. This renders the traditional ways of calculating textual similarity ineffective. In this work, we apply vector representation of words to measure the semantic similarity between text. We …

Active Crowdsourcing For Annotation, Shuji Hao, Chunyan Miao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Crowdsourcing has shown great potential in obtaining large-scale and cheap labels for different tasks. However, obtaining reliable labels is challenging due to several reasons, such as noisy annotators, limited budget and so on. The state-of-the-art approaches, either suffer in some noisy scenarios, or rely on unlimited resources to acquire reliable labels. In this article, we adopt the learning with expert~(AKA worker in crowdsourcing) advice framework to robustly infer accurate labels by considering the reliability of each worker. However, in order to accurately predict the reliability of each worker, traditional learning with expert advice will consult with external oracles~(AKA domain experts) …

Overt And Covert Shandyism Of Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol, Margarit Ordukhanyan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Overt and Covert Shandyism of Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol" Margarit Ordukhanyan examines Vladimir Nabokov's 1942 novel, an unusual biography of the nineteenth-century Russian author. Ordukhanyan discusses parallels between Nabokov's biography of Gogol and Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. She highlights the direct allusions and textual references Nabokov makes to Sterne's novel and argues that Nabokov uses Tristram Shandy as the model for creating and interpreting his biography of Gogol by fictionalizing Gogol and portraying him as a Shandean character. Further, Ordukhanyan discusses how Nabokov uses Sterne's novel to undermine the genre of literary …

Photography, Writing, Literature: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Brunet And Beckman And Weissberg, Geert Vandermeersche

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

New Mexico - Sexual Violence Free, Theresa Cruz, Julia Meredith Hess, Leona Woelk, Samantha Bear

Reports & Documents

New Mexico – Sexual Violence Free: A Statewide Strategic Plan for the Primary Prevention of Sexual Violence, 2015-2020, serves as a path toward ending sexual violence in our state. It provides a framework and establishes a vision, mission, goals, and objectives for moving primary prevention forward. The plan is meant to be used by agencies, organizations, universities, community coalitions, policy-makers, prevention professionals, and other individuals interested in reducing the burden of sexual violence (SV) in New Mexico.

Email And Enron: Using Cmm To Make Better Social Worlds In Organizations, Nicholas Noblet

Communication ETDs

Email as a communication phenomenon has been in existence since the 1970s, and yet researchers are still discovering new information regarding the usage and implications of usage for this medium (Atherton, Sawmynaden, Sheikh, Majeed, & Car, 2012; Zhu and White, 2009). This dissertation seeks to better understand organizational communication through the examination of email. Enron, a very large organization that peaked in the 1990s, utilized email for a variety of different purposes. Enron's email was placed online by the federal government, and includes communication from top executives. These messages represent the largest publicly accessible database of corporate email, and will …

Festivals Of Art, Carnivals Of Representation: On Contemporary Art And Neoliberalism, Tijen Tunali

Art & Art History ETDs

In this dissertation, I look at the changing praxes of contemporary art and culture vis-á-vis neoliberalism. With examples from the Americas, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, I acknowledge, but trespass the visible effects and outcomes of globalization with regard to art and culture. In current literature they often are interpreted as straightforward and homogeneous developments, but in this dissertation, I show the complexity, heterogeneity and inequality of new social, political, and cultural relationships wrought by and against the neoliberal ideology and processes that affect all corners of the world. My main focus is on the dialectics of contemporary art …

Neal Ambrose-Smith: The Artistic Modernity Of Indianness, Erik Parker

Art & Art History ETDs

Neal Ambrose-Smith is an artist of Cree, Metis, and Salish heritage who is at the forefront of contemporary Native American art. A thorough examination of Ambrose-Smiths body of work will reveal that the majority of his art can be viewed as having overwhelming intentions toward a dissolution of boundaries separating the ideas of 'Native,' 'contemporary,' and 'Western art.' It also will show that through the utilization of popular culture and its icons, Ambrose-Smith is able to build a rapport with audiences, while also using images and themes in his art to help break down barriers that contemporary Native artists face …

Designing For Immersive Technology: Integrating Art And Stem Learning, Jane Elizabeth Crayton

Art & Art History ETDs

Students struggle to learn STEM concepts. The arts have been proposed as a means to engage students in STEM education, resulting in the idea of STEAM. However, STEAM approaches do not always result in learning. A collaboration between a major research university and a small Native arts college in the southwestern United States provided an opportunity for studying the potential for arts to engage students in STEM learning. This study investigates how participating art students (N = 4) solved technological and design production problems when working with immersive technologies in a paid summer internship program. The internship program lasted six …

Book Review: Critical Perspectives On Technology And Education Bulfin, S., Johnson, N. & Bigum, C. (Eds., 2015). Palgrave., Jerry Spring

All Works

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Repetitive Sequences With Structured Dynamic Bayesian Networks, Thomas. L. Lake

Masters Theses

Time series often feature structure that is known a priori and easily described using natural language terms such as repetitive, symmetric, seasonal, and self-similar. However, the typical conjugate priors used in Bayesian analysis do not capture such complex phenomena well. As a result of this mismatch, known structure is modeled poorly or completely ignored. Focusing on time series with repetitive structure, this thesis proposes to overcome this problem by reducing rather than in- creasing the capacity of a well know time series model, the Hidden Markov Model. Through a careful choice in the way model capacity is reduced the model …

December 1, 2015, The Daily Mississippian

Daily Mississippian (all digitized issues)

No abstract provided.

Energy-Environment Policy Alignments, Todd S. Aagaard

Faculty Publications

Energy law focuses on making energy widely available at reasonable cost, and environmental law focuses on preventing pollution. As a result of these differences in their respective orientations, the two fields often work incoherently and even in conflict. Historically, federal energy law and environmental law have attempted to manage their interrelationships by imposing negative constraints on each other: Energy policies of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) must comply with requirements set forth in environmental statutes, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) statutes contain energy-related requirements and exemptions. More recently, however, FERC and EPA have begun developing policies that create …

The Impact Of Multimorbidity On Adult Physical And Mental Health In Low- And Middle-Income Countries: What Does The Study On Global Ageing And Adult Health (Sage) Reveal?, P Arokiasamy, U Uttamacharya, K Jain, Rb Biritwum, Et Al

School of Psychology

BACKGROUND: Chronic diseases contribute a large share of disease burden in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Chronic diseases have a tendency to occur simultaneously and where there are two or more such conditions, this is termed as 'multimorbidity'. Multimorbidity is associated with adverse health outcomes, but limited research has been undertaken in LMICs. Therefore, this study examines the prevalence and correlates of multimorbidity as well as the associations between multimorbidity and self-rated health, activities of daily living (ADLs), quality of life, and depression across six LMICs. METHODS: Data was obtained from the WHO's Study on global AGEing and adult health …

Emergence Of Fintech And The Lasic Principles, David K. C. Lee, Ernie G. S. Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Financial technology (FinTech) has been receiving much attention lately. For instance, global investments in FinTech ventures (covering sectors from remittances, loans to payments) have grown 3 times from US$ 4.05 billion in 2013 to US$ 12.21 billion in 2014 (Accenture, 2015). Although the development of FinTech is still in early stages, they will define and shape the future of the financial industry. Even though there are large amounts of funds entering the market, not all FinTech ventures will be successful; various factors (both internal and external) are crucial. We identify some of these factors which we term the LASIC (Low …

An Affect Theory Of Composition, Lindsey L. Novak

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis explores the effect that being published in an online journal has on students' attitudes about writing and their willingness to revise. The impetus for the study was a combination of frustration at seeing the students in the Writing Center devaluing their own work, as well as my own experiences within the academy at large. The problem was that these students were neither seen as "good writers" within an academic setting, nor believed themselves to be such. The methods employed were the creation of a WordPress webpage, with a URL redirect ("boldjournal.org") which served as a forum in which …

Review Of Aviation Research: A Content Analysis Of Articles Published In The Collegiate Aviation Review, 2007–2012, Safak Aktemur

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to conduct a content analysis of the methodological quality of articles published in the Collegiate Aviation Review (CAR)” a refereed journal of the University Aviation Alliance (UAA)”to determine if actual practices of aviation researchers were consistent with commonly recommended research methods and procedures. The accessible population consisted of the 76 articles published in CAR between 2007 and 2012 (Volumes 25“30). The sample consisted of N = 69 articles and excluded literature reviews, meta-analyses, studies that described the development or validation of an instrument, philosophical inquiries, position papers, or historical studies. The analysis focused on …

Isis Propaganda And United States Countermeasures, Daniel Lincoln Stevens

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The purpose of this study is threefold: 1. Examine the use of propaganda by the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and how its propaganda enables ISIS to achieve its objectives; 2. Examine the United States Government (USG) response; 3. Evaluate the effectiveness of the USG response and how it can be improved. The goal of ISIS is to overturn the Middle East, attack westerners in the region and in the West, and create one all-encompassing Islamic State. ISIS' innovative use of propaganda has been central to its success. ISIS uses propaganda more effectively than previous terrorist groups. …

Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst For Innovation, Dominic Orr, Michele Rimini, Dirk Van Damme

Concepts in Animal Parasitology

Foreword:

Open educational resources (OER) are rapidly becoming a major phenomenon in education across OECD countries and beyond. Initiated largely at the level of institutions by pioneers and technology advocates, the OER community has grown considerably over the past ten years and the impact of OER on educational systems has become an issue of public policy. The open education community is increasingly well organised and enjoys support from various institutions and foundations. National governments have developed, or are in the process of developing, open policies to support access to and use of OER.

It is the task of the OECD …

Transcriptomics In Type 2 Diabetes: Bridging The Gap Between Genotype And Phenotype, Christopher Jenkinson, Harald H. H. Goring, Rector Arya, John Blangero, Ravindranath Duggirala, Ralph A. Defronzo

School of Medicine Publications

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a common,multifactorial disease that is influenced by genetic and environmental factors and their interactions. However, common variants identified by genome wide association studies (GWAS) explain only about 10% of the total trait variance for T2D and less than 5% of the variance for obesity, indicating that a large proportion of heritability is still unexplained. The transcriptomic approach described here uses quantitative gene expression and disease-related physiological data (deep phenotyping) to measure the direct correlation between the expression of specific genes and physiological traits. Transcriptomic analysis bridges the gulf between GWAS and physiological studies. Recent GWAS …

World Transit Research December 2015 Newsletter, Institute Of Transport Studies Monash University

World Transit Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.