Digital Commons Network^™

The Potential Impact Of Nutrition Education Courses Accepted By The Parent Aware Program On Nutritional And Physical Activity-Related Knowledge, Attitude, And Behavior Among Childcare Providers And Preschoolers' Parents Whom These Childcare Providers Serve, Rose Janet Prissel

Health Nutrition and Exercise Science

Recently Minnesota (MN) adopted Parent Aware, a childcare quality four star rating system. At the top-star rating, nutrition and childhood obesity prevention education is recommended. However, little is known of its impact on childhood obesity. The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of Parent Aware towards nutrition knowledge, behavior, and attitudes of childcare providers and the parents they serve. A quantitative analysis was conducted using a survey in 2015. Seven hundred and seven childcare providers responded to the questionnaire. The parent survey had 123 responders. There were no significant nutrition knowledge, attitude, or behavioral differences between childcare …

The Effects Of Two Types Of Different Dynamic Warm-Ups And Static Stretching On Total Body Power And Speed, Ryan David Napoli

Health Nutrition and Exercise Science

Static stretching has often been found to decrease performance in power and speed activities, but dynamic warm-ups usually increase performance. We examined the effects of a mini-band warm-up, a medicine ball warm-up, and static stretching on 10m and 20m sprint times, as well as overhead medicine ball throw performance. A convenience sample of 24 Division I women’s soccer players participated, however 5 subjects dropped out due to sustaining injuries from a weekend soccer tournament. The subjects completed the three warm-ups and a control 5 minute jog condition on separate days and were tested on the 10m and 20m sprint times …

Morphological Differences And Diversity Of Small Mammal Species, Jeffrey David Berens

Environmental and Conservation Sciences

Small mammals play important roles in ecosystems, but are often overlooked due to their small size and plentiful abundance. Two studies evaluated the morphological differences and diversity of small mammal species based on how they react to different environmental conditions. The first study analyzed the morphological differences of skulls between and within two species of Peromyscus species due to differences in shape, size, and geographic position. This study also determined if landmark-based geometric morphometrics could reliably discriminate between the two species. The second study analyzed small mammal diversity and abundance due to differences in microhabitat conditions in an endangered ecosystem: …

Application Of Organ Clearance To Estimation Of The In Vivo Hepatic Extraction Ratio, Reza Mehvar

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Organ clearance, which has been derived from the organ blood flow and extraction ratio (E), has been extensively used by clinical pharmacologists to explain the pharmacokinetics of many drugs in health and disease. For example, the extent of hepatic clearance or E (E_h) of drugs would determine their response to changes in the liver blood flow and/or activities of the metabolizing enzymes. Although E_h may be obtained directly by cannulating internal blood vessels, the method is invasive. Therefore, indirect methods have been used to estimate E_h from the peripheral blood concentration-time data after intravascular administration of …

The Disease Burden And The Extent Of Drug Therapy Problems In An Underserved Minority Population Receiving Medication Therapy Management At An Ambulatory Care Free Clinic, D. N. Ombengi, F. A. Ndemo, Ayman M. Noreddin, W. T. Harris

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Objective: To determine the common medical conditions, medications, and associated drug therapy problems in an underserved minority population receiving medication therapy management services at a large Community Free Clinic compared to the findings of the Minnesota Pharmaceutical Care Project.

Methods: Retrospective cohort study of a random sample of 60 minority patients referred for medication therapy management service at a Community Free Clinic from January 2012 to January 2014. Patient data including demographics, medication experience, past medical and medication history, medical conditions, active medications, allergies, immunization history and drug therapy was systematically evaluated to determine the most common conditions, …

Medication Therapy Management, Ayman M. Noreddin, Francis Ndemo, David Ombengi

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

"According to the Institute of Medicine report medications are the most common medical intervention. However, drug-related morbidity and mortality now represents a major public health challenge due to the ineffective and unsafe consequences of medication use. Morbidity in this case relates to disease and illness associated with drug therapy whereas mortality relates to death associated with drug therapy. It is also estimated in the US that drug-related morbidity and mortality cost about $200 billion annually in health care expenditure.

This is clearly a failure in our healthcare systems."

Unearthing The Process Roots Of Environment Ethics: Whitehead, Leopold, And The Land Ethic, Brian G. Henning

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

The aim of this essay is twofold. First, I examine the role of Alfred North Whitehead and process thinkers in bringing about and shaping the field of environmental ethics. As we will see, our job is not so much to develop the connections between Whitehead and environmental thought as to recover them. Second, given this genealogical work, I invite process scholars to reconsider their generally hostile reception of Aldo Leopold and his land ethic. I suggest that a version of the land ethic grounded in a process axiology could make a significant contribution to contemporary environmental thought.

From The Anthropocene To The Ecozoic: Philosophy And Global Climate Change, Brian G. Henning

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Animal Groups And Social Ontology: An Argument From The Phenomenology Of Behavior, Alejandro Arango

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Through a critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the concepts of nature, life, and behavior, and with contemporary accounts of animal groups, this article argues that animal groups exhibit sociality and that sociality is a fundamental ontological condition. I situate my account in relation to the superorganism and selfish individual accounts of animal groups in recent biology and zoology. I argue that both accounts are inadequate. I propose an alternative account of animal groups and animal sociality through a Merleau-Pontian inspired definition of behavior. I criticize Merleau-Ponty’s individualistic prejudice, but show that his philosophy contains the resources necessary to overcome …

Molecular Mechanisms Of Suberoylanilide Hydroxamic Acid In The Inhibition Of Tgf-Β1-Mediated Canine Corneal Fibrosis, Kristina M. Gronkiewicz, Elizabeth A. Giuliano, Ajay Sharma, Rajiv R. Mohan

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Objective—To investigate molecular mechanisms mediating anti-fibrotic effect of SAHA in the canine cornea using an in vitro model. We hypothesized that SAHA attenuates corneal fibrosis by modulating Smad-dependent and, to a lesser extent, Smad-independent signaling pathways activated by TGF-β1, as well as matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activity.

Methods—Cultured canine corneal fibroblasts (CCF) were incubated in the presence/absence of TGF-β1 (5ng/ml) and SAHA (2.5μM) for 24hrs. Western blot analysis was used to quantify non-phosphorylated and phosphorylated isoforms of Smad2/3, p38 MAP kinase (MAPK), ERK1/2 and JNK1. Real-time PCR and zymography were utilized to quantify MMP1, MMP2, MMP8 and MMP9 mRNA expression and …

Phenolic Antioxidant-Linked Bioactive Enrichment In Black Beans (Phaseolus Vulgaris L.) To Screen For Health Benefits And Enhancement Of Salinity Resilience, Jordan Orwat

Cereal Science

Dietary consumption of black bean has diverse human health benefits which can be targeted as part of dietary strategies for chronic disease management. A gap in knowledge currently exists regarding how to advance the efficient production of black bean under abiotic stress conditions with the potential to simultaneously enrich human health-relevant bioactives in harvested beans. Therefore, the objective was to evaluate the effects of seed and foliar elicitation treatments on metabolic regulation and health-relevant bioactive markers in dark-germinated sprouts and field-grown black beans using in vitro assays. Further, a study was designed to evaluate the combined effects of salinity stress, …

A Survey On Trust Management In Cloud Computing, Maryam Roodaki

Computer Science

Nowadays the number of people that outsource their data to the cloud increases dramatically. Cloud computing offer cost-effective dynamic, scalable and shared services for enterprises from remote data centre. However, the problem of trusting cloud computing is a paramount concern for most enterprises in such a way that trust is widely regarded as one of the top obstacles for the adoption and growth of cloud computing. There are a lot of methods proposed by researchers to help the consumers identify the cloud service provider who seems to be more reliable. These trust-aided unified evaluation framework help in measuring the trustworthiness …

Using Learning Styles Of Software Professionals To Improve Their Inspection Performance: An Empirical Study, Abhinav Singh

Computer Science

In the IT industry, good requirements specification plays a vital role in software projects success. Researches revealed that early detection of faults in a requirements document saves significant amount of rework. To achieve that, project managers employ inspectors to review and find faults in software requirement specification (SRS) document. Previous researches investigated that factors like educational background and work experience could impact the effectiveness of individual inspectors, with limited success. This research hypothesizes that Learning Style (LS) of individuals can be utilized to improve the performance of individual inspectors and inspection teams. The LS refers to the ways an individual …

Signature Extraction From E-Mails, Divya Muttineni

Computer Science

Detecting user identity information from the email is one of the predominant exploring topics in data mining. One approach is to extract signature from the body of emails. Those names are usually suitable for representing the sender’s or recipient’s identity. To overcome the limitation, we proposed the novel approach to extract the signature of email sender and recipient from salutation and signature blocks and email bodies. After locating and extracting signature blocks from email bodies, we can identify the names in the salutation and signature lines, which can be directly associated with the corresponding email address in email headers and …

Light Weight Health Application For Low End Cell Phones, Peyman Emamian

Computer Science

Health applications are usually complicated and low end devices do not benefit from them. The focus of this thesis is on expandable health services platform for low end cell phones. Large number of mobile phones in the world are incapable using web or modern operating systems and pre-installed SMS application is the preferred communication medium. Moreover, SMS does not require a stable connection so text-based health information can still be available even during natural disasters. Although our platform is accessible through communication forms other than SMS. We propose a scalable platform for light weight health applications, providing novel and proactive …

Sea-Level Rise Impacts On Transport Infrastructure: The Notorious Case Of The Coastal Railway Line At Dawlish, England, David Dawson, Jon Shaw, R Gehrels

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Future climate change is likely to increase the frequency of coastal storms and floods, with major consequences for coastal transport infrastructure. This paper assesses the extent to which projected sea-level rise is likely to impact upon the functioning of the Dawlish to Teignmouth stretch of the London to Penzance railway line, in England. Using a semi-empirical modelling approach, we identify a relationship between sea-level change and rail incidents over the last 150 years and then use model-based sea-level predictions to extrapolate this relationship into the future. We find that days with line restrictions (DLRs) look set to increase by up …

Computing The Yield Per Acre For A Given Field Using Gis Capabilities, Sadhana Badu

Computer Science

Software tools and technologies, such as geographic information systems (GIS), are playing an important role in the field of agriculture. The capabilities of the open source GIS system GRASS are used to process LandSat imagery and calculate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), as a measure of biomass, for a given agricultural field at times before and after early harvest activity. Areas for which the NDVI value decreases substantially between two images are assumed to have been harvested during that time. Knowledge of the harvested area, in conjunction with the delivery records from American Crystal Sugar, allows computing the yield …

Perceptions Of Genetically Modified Foods By Gender, Yang Lu

Computer Science

Twitter is one of the most popular worldwide social networking services. It has more than 320 million monthly active users around the world. So it’s a very good way to discover what’s happening in the world and we can even get people’s opinions of some topics through their posts. Genetically modified food is one of the hottest topics all over the world. For the work of this paper, our aim is to determine people’s opinions concerning GMOs, but also interested in whether there are differences by gender. To achieve the goal, the idea is to capture a large set of …

Software Metrics Tool, Vijay Reddy Reddy

Computer Science

A software metric is the measurement of a particular characteristic of a software program. These metrics are very useful for optimizing the performance of the software, managing resources, debugging, schedule planning, quality assurance and periodic calculation of software metrics increases the success rate of any software project. Therefore, a software metrics tool is developed in this research which provides an extensible way to calculate software metrics. The tool developed is a web-based application which has the ability to calculate some of the important software metrics and statistics as well. It also provides a functionality to the user to add additional …

A General Framework For Developing Multi-Surface Environments, Zheng Huang

Computer Science

Since multi-touch technique has been used widely for personal device, such as smartphone, personal computer and tabletop, many forms of interaction are developed and served for user’s daily usage. But forms of interaction can be barely found between tabletop and smartphone. Therefore, we propose a general framework for facilitating developers and users to develop multi-surface applications. Our general framework uses the smartphone as input and output device to overcome limits and extends features of tabletop. We provide some applications based on treating smartphones as both input and output devices to demonstrate the implementation of our framework for smartphone on the …

No Return To Classical Reality, David Jennings, Matthew S. Leifer

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

At a fundamental level, the classical picture of the world is dead, and has been dead now for almost a century. Pinning down exactly which quantum phenomena are responsible for this has proved to be a tricky and controversial question, but a lot of progress has been made in the past few decades. We now have a range of precise statements showing that whatever the ultimate laws of Nature are, they cannot be classical. In this article, we review results on the fundamental phenomena of quantum theory that cannot be understood in classical terms. We proceed by rst granting quite …

The End Of The Mill: A Forensic Interpretation Of Swany White And Reconstruction Of A Local Brewery, Joseph Miller

Architecture Theses

The End of Mills; A Forensic Interpretation of Swany White and Reconstruction of a Local Brewery addresses the question, “How can the loss of the last Century old flour mill in Minnesota be commemorated?” For an architectural design exploration, the building type best suited for this celebration is one that has a strong connect to how grain processing and milling industry contributed to rural economic development in the state of Minnesota. The beer brewing trend across the US has contributed to a renaissance of the importance of local products. Across the state, local breweries have become what local flour milling …

Renewing Rural Small Town Life, Katelyn Kostad

Architecture Theses

This thesis explores a possible answer to the question: how would a rural community be renewed through reawakened development? The Irvin Hotel is an often overlooked, abandoned building located in downtown Kenmare, North Dakota. This thesis explores the possibilities of historic preservation and adaptively reusing the hotel as an independent living facility, hotel, apartments, dining, and event venue. This thesis also explores the benefits of creating an all age center for social interaction featuring recreational activities and spaces for gathering on a vacant corner lot located downtown. This thesis focuses on renewing community spirit through architecture and reviving the quality …

Pataphysical Prosthesis: Bringing The 3d Printing Industry From Detroit, Mi To The World, Carmen Johnson

Architecture Theses

Modern architectural theory criticizes the use of computers in architectural design for producing cold, inhuman environments. How then should we use the fascinating technology at our fingertips if we are told that doing so will result in meaningless architecture? Historically, man has been driven to push technology forward. Technology plays a crucial role in the way that humans perceive and experience the world, and the innate calling to advance technology has become a construct of our identity as a species and a culture. However, we stand at risk to lose control of technology, and in doing so would lose a …

Human's Offense - Nature's Defense, Craig Cusick

Architecture Theses

How can design influence the way we view, understand and interact with a powerfully dynamic natural setting? No matter how long or to what extent that man intervenes with the natural world, mother nature will always eventually take back ownership of the land. As humans we need to realize this reality and design for its eventuality. This project focuses on the vegetation, wildlife, and geology of the North Shore of Lake Superior. This stretch of land is a popular destination for visitors and locals alike, but many of those visitors lack an understanding of how the north shore has become …

Comparative Analysis Of The Profit Risk In The Cultivation Of Energy Beet In North Dakota, Asanka Sanjeewa Wijesinghe

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

Energy beet is a promising ethanol feedstock as it did not compromise the food security given it is not used as a food or feed. Although the technological and financial feasibility studies were available the risk of yield and profit aspect is not considered in the previous studies. Hence this study focuses on the cost of private risk bearing of a representative energy beet grower comparing to the other crops in North Dakota. The lowest risk premium is reported for the dry land production at the Langdon Research and Extension Centre (REC). Further in Langdon energy beet has the lowest …

Rail Car Trip Transit Time And The Effects On Grain Trading Company Profits, Nathaniel Gesme

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

This examines the logistic process of a grain trading company, and how logistics affect profits. Trip transit time is the amount of times a shuttle train moves back and forth from an elevator and a destination. In the years prior to the 2013/ 2014 crop year, shuttles moved between elevators and destination nearly 3 times in a given month. When transit time dropped in 2013, this created a unique situation to be examined. It changed how grain trading companies needed to alter strategy to maintain a profit. The decrease in trip transit time affected how rail cars moved, but also …

2016 Annual Research Report, Langdon Research Extension Center

Annual Reports - Langdon

No abstract provided.

Disengagement From Ideologically-Based And Violent Organizations: A Systematic Review Of The Literature, Steven Windisch, Peter Simi, Gina Sott Ligon, Hillary Mcneel

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Research on disengagement from violent extremism is an emerging field of inquiry. As compared to the related field of radicalization, there have been fewer studies of disengagement. Further, little effort has been made to conduct a large scale, systematic review of what is currently known about disengagement from violent extremism. This type of meta-literature assessment can play an important role in terms of informing strategies and programs designed to facilitate exit. To help fill this gap, our project systematically examines the disengagement literature to determine the range and frequency of various exit factors identified in previous studies. We also rely …

The Green Line: Promoting Safety And Connections Through A Year Round Bicycle Network For Fargo, North Dakota., Everett Eide

Landscape Architecture Theses

This paper will define what qualities make bicycle paths and lanes safe and easy to see. Winter maintenance strategies that are successful in ensuring year round use will be defined as well. First, data from various sources is gathered to determine factors that can allow a bike path or lane to be safe and enjoyable to ride on for all seasons. Data that will be researched will consist of: 1. Comparing different types of bike paths and their specific qualities such as width and paint coloring. 2. Road speeds and widths. 3. Winter maintenance plans used in other cities and …