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W448-006f-01 - College Of Visual And Performing Arts: Administrative Records: Correspondence And Memoranda, College Of Visual And Performing Arts

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An Investigation Of The Duality Between Art And Math, Hope Hickman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The following paper is an investigation of the relationship that exists between math and art. It argues the importance of integration between the two disciplines by shedding light on unrecognized characteristics within both. The paper provides examples of mathematical art and beautiful proofs which help unearth the potential of mixing math and art at an academic level.

Heroes, Past And Future, Benjamin Green

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

A creative work set in a small town in which everyone has a supernatural ability called a "Gift." This work shows the characters, all on different walks of life, as they show that the metaphorical fish cannot outgrow the fish bowl. Those who have lived in this town all their lives seem to have weaker Gifts than those who have lived even one hour away. Heroes, Past and Future explores how one cannot hope to meet their true potential as a person except by allowing themselves to move even slightly away from the familiar.

Toward The Elucidation Of Cytoplasmic Diversity In North American Grape Breeding Programs, Jonathan Fresnedo-Ramirez, Qi Sun, Chin-Feng Hwang, Craig A. Ledbetter, David W. Ramming, Anne Fennell, M. Andrew Walker, James J. Luby, Matthew D. Clark, Jason P. Londo, Lance Cadle-Davidson, Gan-Yuan Zhong

Agronomy, Horticulture and Plant Science Faculty Publications

Plants have an intriguing tripartite genetic system: Nuclear genome 9 Mitochondria 9 Plastids and their interactions may impact germplasm breeding. In grapevine, the study of cytoplasmic genomes has been limited, and their role with respect to grapevine germplasm diversity has yet to be elucidated. In the present study, the results of an analysis of the cytoplasmic diversity among 6073 individuals (comprising cultivars, interspecific hybrids and segregating progenies) are presented. Genotyping by sequencing (GBS) was used to elucidate plastid and mitochondrial DNA sequences, and results were analyzed using multivariate techniques. Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) effects were annotated in reference to plastid …

Lipid-Protein Interactions Via Fluorescence Quenching In Small Unilamellar Vesicles, Talia Kordahi

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Studying peptide interactions with model membranes have aided in understanding protein-lipid interactions more clearly. In this report, fluorescent small unilamellar vesicles (SUVs) of a known composition were made. Two peptides, RND1 and MARCKS, were also fluorescently labeled and added to a solution of SUVs. The interactions between these were observed via fluorescence quenching, read out with a spectrofluorimeter. In addition, two environments of buffer were tested: 1X PBS and 0.1X PBS. After obtaining data, it was concluded that MARCKS quenched the SUVs more than RND1. This could be due to the presence of more lysine amino acids in MARCKS, which …

The Tension Between Traditional Consent And Affirmative Consent: A Kantian Solution, Marissa N. Deshon

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In this paper I analyze the issues present in the standard form of consent in contrast to the new form of affirmative consent being implemented across college campuses. I then offer a Kantian solution to the rape myths and beliefs present in our current rape culture. This view of sexual morality can then help the new affirmative consent laws function as they aim to.

Assessing The Expression Of Astrocytic Markers In Retinal Ganglion Cell Projection Of Lcr/Hcr Rats, Isabella K. Bartholomew, Samuel Crish, James Holda, Jordan Renna, Gina Wilson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Metabolic Syndrome is a human condition that presents with various metabolic issues such as abnormal distribution of body fat, high blood pressure, and a prothrombotic state, among other problems (Alberti,et al, 2005). This syndrome is a risk factor for visual disorders, such as glaucoma, and is often associated with increased levels of neuroinflammation. Currently, the animal model used to replicate this syndrome is The Low Capacity Runner and High Capacity Runner Rat Model. These rats have been bred based on their running capacities for 30+ generations to have drastic metabolic differences. We assessed key areas of the retinal ganglion cell …

Effect Of Altered Vegfr2 Expression On Oxidative Stress In A Rodent Model Of Preeclampsia Pathology, Madison Kaser

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Preeclampsia is a disease that results in pathologies in both the mother and the fetus that lead to oxidative stress. A decrease in vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) signaling may be one factor that contributes to this pathology. We hypothesize that by increasing vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR2) expression via administration of L-tyrosine phosphate (LTP) nanoparticles, the conditions of both the mother and fetus will be improved. Following treatment with the nanoparticles, we will employ a lucigenin chemiluminescence assay to determine levels of oxidative stress within the placenta. There are three groups that will be compared which are …

Case Study: Observing The Effects Of Length Of Exposure To Mnv On Mice Colonies, Beau Brown

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Four groups of experimental mice are studied in this experiment following intentional exposure to murine norovirus (MNV). Two groups are exposed to the virus at different points in their lives, and the other two are not infected and studied alongside the other groups as controls.

Past research has indicated that B and T immune cells are not essential to MNV resistance. Additionally, antibody production against MNV has shown to be slow as infection progresses. Thus, the expected results from the experiment are that the mice with longer infections of MNV will have larger quantities of IgG than those more recently …

Traversing The East Coast In A Pair Of Converse, Laura A. Stall

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. My journey began with a step in a pair of low-top pink Converse sneakers. In this creative nonfiction piece, I wrote about my journey through life through my shoes. In humorous and sometimes touching stories, I recount the people and events that I feel have shaped me to be who I am today, whether that is a good or bad thing. Every anecdote comes fresh with a pair of Converse sneakers. However, in the end, the story is not just about the shoes; it’s about the life …

Using Zeolite For Soil Moisture Retention And Salinity Control, Mark Torres

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

There is a great need in the desert southwest United States for exploring ways to save water in agriculture as it accounts for up to 90 percent of water consumption in many western states (USDA 2016). As surface water reaches critical lows the dependence on ground water has increased leading to the need for deeper wells with higher salt concentrations. The studies conducted for this research included using zeolites from the St Cloud Mining Company in Winston, New Mexico to determine the feasibility of using these zeolites to help and retain moisture in zeolite treated soils. The Volumetric Water Content …

The New Issues In Classification Problems, Md Mahmudul Hasan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The data involved with science and engineering getting bigger everyday. To study and organize a big amount of data is difficult without classification. In machine learning, classification is the problem of identifying a given data from a set of categories. There are several classification technique people using to classify a given data. In our work we present a sparse representation technique to perform classification. The popularity of this technique motivates us to use on our collected samples. To find a sparse representation, we used an $l_1$-minimization algorithm which is a convex relaxation algorithm proven very efficient by researchers. The purpose …

Silver Nanoparticles Induce Pro-Inflammatory Gene Expression And Inflammasome Activation In Human Monocytes, A. Murphy, A. Casey, G. Byrne, Gordon Chambers, Orla L. Howe

Articles

A complete cytotoxic profile of exposure to silver (AgNP) nanoparticles investigating their biological effects on the innate immune response of circulating white blood cells is required to form a complete understanding of the risk posed. This was explored by measuring AgNP-stimulated gene expression of the pro-inflammatory cytokines interleukin-1 (IL-1), interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) in THP-1 monocytes. A further study, on human monocytes extracted from a cohort of blood samples, was carried out to compare with the AgNP immune response in THP-1 cells along with the detection of pro-IL-1β which is a key mediator of the inflammasome complex. …

Free Exercise By Moonlight, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

How is the current condition of religious free exercise, and religious accommodation in specific, best understood? What is the relationship of the two most important free exercise cases of the past half-century, Employment Division v. Smith and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC? This essay explores four possible answers to these questions.

1. Smith and Hosanna-Tabor are the twin suns of religious accommodation under the Constitution. They are distinctively powerful approaches.

2. Hosanna-Tabor’s approach to constitutional free exercise is now more powerful than Smith’s. Smith has been eclipsed.

3. Hosanna-Tabor has shown itself to be feeble. It has …

Virtue, Freedom, And The First Amendment, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The modern First Amendment embodies the idea of freedom as a fundamental good of contemporary American society. The First Amendment protects and promotes everybody’s freedom of thought, belief, speech, and religious exercise as basic goods—as given ends of American political and moral life. It does not protect these freedoms for the sake of promoting any particular vision of the virtuous society. It is neutral on that score, setting limits only in those rare cases when the exercise of a First Amendment freedom exacts an intolerable social cost.

Something like this collection of views constitutes the conventional account of the First …

Police Suspects, Kate Levine

Faculty Publications

Recent attention to police brutality has brought to the fore how police, when they become the subject of criminal investigations, are given special procedural protections not available to any other criminal suspect. Prosecutors’ special treatment of police suspects, particularly their perceived use of grand juries to exculpate accused officers, has received the lion’s share of scholarly and media attention. But police suspects also benefit from formal affirmative rights that protect them from interrogation by other officers. Police, in most jurisdictions, have a special shield against interrogation known as the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBORs). These statutes and negotiated …

Mediterranean Water Shrew (Neomys Anomalus): Range Expansion Northward, Linas Balciauskas, Laima Balciauskiene, Uudo Timm

Turkish Journal of Zoology

We identified three individuals of the Mediterranean water shrew (Neomys anomalus) in Estonia, expanding the known distribution range of the species to the north by 500 km from the most northern location in Lithuania and over 700 km from Poland. The identification of the species in Estonia, the most northern known locality, was based on the position of mental foramen, height of coronoid process (>4.3 mm), and Libois index (

Effects Of Epichloë Coenophiala−Tall Fescue Symbiosis On Plant-Microbe-Soil Interactions In A Temperate Pasture, Lindsey C. Slaughter

Theses and Dissertations--Plant and Soil Sciences

Plants interact in myriad ways with microorganisms to influence ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling, which can regulate ecosystem response to global change. One important plant-microbe symbiosis occurs between cool-season grasses and asexual fungal Epichloë endophytes, such as tall fescue (Schedonorus arundinaceus) and Epichloë coenophiala. Because the common toxic strain of the endophyte (CTE) harms grazing livestock, non-livestock toxic endophyte (NTE) strains have been developed and are increasingly deployed in pastures. Little is known about how these symbioses impact other plant-microbe interactions and microbe-mediated soil processes in grassland ecosystems. I conducted three studies to determine how E. …

Insights Into Triterpene Metabolism In Model Monocotyledonous And Oilseed Plants Genetically Engineered With Genes From Botryococcus Braunii, Chase F. Kempinski

Theses and Dissertations--Plant and Soil Sciences

Isoprenoids are one of the most diverse classes of natural products and are all derived from universal five carbon, prenyl precursors. Squalene and botryococcene are linear, hydrocarbon triterpenes (thirty carbon compounds with six prenyl units) that have industrial and medicinal values. Squalene is produced by all eukaryotes as it is the first committed precursor to sterols, while botryococcene is uniquely produced by the green algae, Botryococcus braunii (race B). Natural sources for these compounds exist, but there is a desire for more renewable production platforms. The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana was engineered to accumulate botryococcene and squalene in its oil …

Field Evaluation Of Burley Lines Containing Alleles Minimizing Nicotine To Nornicotine Conversion, Cameron G. Shelton

Theses and Dissertations--Plant and Soil Sciences

CYP82e4, CYP82e5, and CYP82e10 mutant alleles that minimize the conversion of nicotine to nornicotine have been introgressed into numerous existing low converting (LC) burley varieties and parental lines developed by the Kentucky-Tennessee tobacco breeding program. A backcross breeding protocol was utilized, with the objective being the creation of "e3" varieties that differed from their LC counterparts only for nornicotine and nitroso-nornicotine content. Field studies were conducted in Kentucky and Tennessee during the 2013 growing season, with 17 prospective parental lines and 20 prospective commercial varieties grown and compared to their original counterparts. Most of the e3 lines were not morphologically …

“But Who, We?”: Derrida On Non-Human Others, Thomas Helmut Bretz

Dissertations

In this dissertation I establish the possibility of social and ethical relationships with non-human natural (and in particular inanimate) beings. I do so based on the work of 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In chapter 1 I discuss the relatively sparse secondary literature that addresses the intersection between Derrida's work and environmental philosophy. I also go over some textual indications that show that Derrida has been concerned with non-human beings throughout his career.

In chapters 2 and 3 I establish the impossibility of conclusively excluding any kind of being from the purview of ethical responsibility. While chapter 2 develops …

Sex Differences In Stroke Recovery: Synaptic Proteins And The Growth Inhibitory Protein Nogo A, Vincent Joseph Borkowski

Dissertations

Ischemic stroke is a major world-wide health problem, resulting in death and disability especially in the older population. A sex difference exists in functional recovery post-stroke, with post-menopausal women having worse functional outcome as compared to age-matched men. Although the mechanisms underlying this sex difference are not entirely clear, it is recommended that any potential therapy for stroke recovery be tested in pre-clinical models including both male and females in order to determine the efficacy of the proposed treatment on the entire population. We have reported a novel therapy to enhance brain plasticity and improve functional recovery after stroke in …

Comparison Of Rdna Regions (Its, Lsu, And Ssu) Of Some Aspergillus, Penicillium, And Talaromyces Spp., Rasi̇me Demi̇rel

Turkish Journal of Botany

Aspergillus, Penicillium, and Talaromyces spp. are commonly found worldwide and include industrially and medicinally important members. These genera are deeply related with life from soil to health hazards via their industrial products, surface proteins, biodiversity, food spoilage, mycotoxins, etc. These three genera progressively encounter important taxonomic revisions, such as the one fungus-one name concept, and various methods are available to establish their evolutionary and phylogenetic relationships. Besides morphological, microscopic, and extrolite analyses, nucleotide sequence analysis is the most preferred method. In particular, rDNA regions, such as the internal transcribed spacer (ITS), large subunit (LSU), and small subunit (SSU), are commonly …

Parody And The Pen: Pippi Longstocking, Harriet M. Welsch, And Flavia De Luce As Disrupters Of Space, Language, And The Male Gaze, Kelsey Mclendon

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In opposition to a literary tradition of damsel-in-distress female characters, Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, and Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie provide examples of empowered, intelligent, and capable young girls living in a mid-20th century environment and successfully subverting patriarchal norms. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s theory on women as spectacle, Hélène Cixous’s concept of l’ecriture feminine, and New Historicist influences, I explore the common threads within these post-World War II era texts. Pippi’s strength and humor, Harriet’s spying and writing, and Flavia’s scientific expertise and detectival work illustrate their …

Tricking For Change: Establishing The Literary Trickster In The Western Tradition, Christopher Michael Stuart

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis proposes a new category for literary analysis called the literary trickster figure. Over the last few centuries, the trickster figure has been reduced from a cultural hero to a dubious character. If we trace the trickster’s western roots back to Hermes, Mercury, and Loki and take global trickster scholarship into consideration, criteria can be established and the role of the literary trickster can be assessed. The literary trickster’s role is to undermine the established order (social and political hierarchies), create disorder and bring awareness to systemic issues in order to bring about change. Once the literary trickster category …

Lifelines Winter 2016, Southern Adventist University

Lifelines - Biology Department Newsletter

The Winter 2016 issue of Lifelines contains articles on research on air pollutants, an alumni feature, student mission in Peru, and a pictorial directory of the 2016 biology and allied health graduates.

Columns Spring 2016, Southern Adventist University

Alumni Newsletter

Features the article "Sacred Spaces". Worship occurs anywhere we connect deeply with the Savior. Despite this divine flexibility, many Christians are creatures of habit with a handful of locations that unlock our hearts to His leading more than others. Southern offers a variety of beautiful places and intentional programming that helps students recharge and reconnect with God.

Improved Sugar Yields From Biomass Sorghum Feedstocks: Comparing Low‑Lignin Mutants And Pretreatment Chemistries, Bruno Godin, Nick Nagle, Scott Satler, Richard Agneessens, Jérôme Delcarte, Edward Wolfrum

United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service / University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Faculty Publications

Background: For biofuel production processes to be economically efficient, it is essential to maximize the production of monomeric carbohydrates from the structural carbohydrates of feedstocks. One strategy for maximizing carbohydrate production is to identify less recalcitrant feedstock cultivars by performing some type of experimental screening on a large and diverse set of candidate materials, or by identifying genetic modifications (random or directed mutations or transgenic plants) that provide decreased recalcitrance. Economic efficiency can also be increased using additional pretreatment processes such as deacetylation, which uses dilute NaOH to remove the acetyl groups of hemicellulose prior to dilute acid pretreatment. In …

Selective Induced Altered Coccidians To Immunize And Prevent Enteritis, Helieh S. Oz

Physiology Faculty Publications

Microbiomic flora in digestive tract is pivotal to the state of our health and disease. Antibiotics affect GI, control composition of microbiome, and shift equilibrium from health into disease status. Coccidiosis causes gastrointestinal inflammation. Antibiotic additives contaminate animal products and enter food chain, consumed by humans with possible allergic, antibiotic resistance and enigmatic side effects. Purposed study induced nonpathogenic, immunogenic organisms to protect against disease and abolish antibiotics’ use in food animals and side effects in man. Diverse species of Coccidia were used as model. Immature organisms were treated with serial purification procedure prior to developmental stages to obtain altered …

Enhancing Conservation Options: An Argument For Statutory Recognition Of Options To Purchase Conservation Easements (Opces), Federico Cheever, Jessica Owley

Journal Articles

The most dynamic component of the conservation movement in the United States for the past three decades has been land conservation transactions. In the United States, land conservation organizations have protected roughly 40 million acres of land through transactions. Most of these acres have been protected using conservation easements. Climate change threatens the vast conservation edifice created by land conservation transactions. The tools of land conservation transactions are, traditionally, stationary. Climate change means that the resources that land conservation transactions were intended to protect may no longer remain on the land protected. Options to purchase conservation easements (OPCEs) have long …