Digital Commons Network^™

Gender Discrimination And Statelessness In The Gulf Cooperation Council States, Betsy L. Fisher

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Using the Gulf Cooperation Council countries as a case study, this Article outlines the ways in which gender and birth status discrimination create new cases of statelessness. These occur when women are legally unable to convey their nationality to their children. This Article studies gender and birth status discrimination in nationality laws and in civil registration, family, and criminal law in each GCC state: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Ending statelessness will require these states to end discrimination against women and non-marital children in all of its forms in law and practice.

R-Egg-Ulation: A Call For Greater Regulation Of The Big Business Of Human Egg Harvesting, Danielle A. Vera

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

When it comes to young healthy women “donating” their eggs, America has a regulation problem. This Note explains the science behind the harvesting of human eggs, focusing on potential egg donors, and describes the specific factors that make egg donation a unique type of transaction. It describes the current regulatory status of the assisted reproductive technology industry in the United States and highlights the ways in which this scheme fails to protect egg “donors.” This Note concludes with a call for comprehensive regulation of the assisted reproductive technology industry.

Diabetes, Depression And Syndemic Suffering Among African American Patients: The Intersectionality Of Race, Gender And Class, Pamela Lorraine Fox

Social Work Dissertations - Archive

This research study illustrates the overarching syndemic theory, which was used to explain the interconnections of type 2 diabetes, clinical depression, and human suffering among low-income African American outpatients in the southern sector of Dallas TX, USA. The intersections of race, gender, and class were additional variables that were included in this research. Furthermore, this research indicated how poverty, social relationships and other conditions stressed individuals and populations, weakened their natural defenses and caused exposure to disease clusters. I have coined the term D2 S2 to deconstruct the social/syndemic interconnections that interface with diabetes, depression and human suffering. The first …

Identification Of The Plateau Of Cadmium Extraction From An Aquatic Medium By Invasive Macrophyte: Eichhornia Crassipes, Micalah Spenrath

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

The Antibacterial Activity Of Organotins And Organometallics, Jaclyn Bazaldua

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Genomics And Csf Analyses Implicate Thyroid Hormone In Hippocampal Sclerosis Of Aging, Peter T. Nelson, Yuriko Katsumata, Kwangsik Nho, Sergey C. Artiushin, Gregory A. Jicha, Wang-Xia Wang, Erin L. Abner, Andrew J. Saykin, Walter A. Kukull, Alzheimer’S Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (Adni), David W. Fardo

Sanders-Brown Center on Aging Faculty Publications

We report evidence of a novel pathogenetic mechanism in which thyroid hormone dysregulation contributes to dementia in elderly persons. Two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on chromosome 12p12 were the initial foci of our study: rs704180 and rs73069071. These SNPs were identified by separate research groups as risk alleles for non-Alzheimer’s neurodegeneration. We found that the rs73069071 risk genotype was associated with hippocampal sclerosis (HS) pathology among people with the rs704180 risk genotype (National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center/Alzheimer’s Disease Genetic Consortium data; n = 2113, including 241 autopsy-confirmed HS cases). Furthermore, both rs704180 and rs73069071 risk genotypes were associated with widespread brain …

2016-December-01-Avocado Research, University Marketing And Commucications, East Tennessee State Univeristy

ETSU News

No abstract provided.

Review Of Booming From The Mists Of Nowhere: The Story Of The Greater Prairie-Chicken By Greg Hoch, Ross H. Hier

The Prairie Naturalist

The Greater Prairie-Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus) is an iconic species inhabiting one of the most iconic and rarest habitats in the world—the tallgrass prairies of central North America. To tell the story of the Greater Prairie-Chicken is a monumental task. Its history is intricately woven into pre- and post-European settlement of the North American prairies in such a way that knowledge of the species is spread over several centuries. Thus, researching the “old and the new” regarding the Greater Prairie-Chicken requires a substantial literature review, much of which occurs in publications from the 1800s. Hoch has done a …

Finding The Best Remaining Black Hills Montane Grasslands, The First Step In Conservation, Hollis Marriott, Don Faber-Langendoen, David J. Ode

The Prairie Naturalist

Black Hills Montane Grassland is a rare and endangered plant community endemic to the Black Hills of western South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming. It is restricted to higher elevations on the Limestone Plateau in the western part of the uplift. Early visitors to the Black Hills wrote glowing reports of flower-filled grasslands on the Limestone Plateau. Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and his soldiers reveled in lush grass, and decorated the headgear of their horses with flowers (Custer 1875). Expedition botanist A. B. Donaldson “estimated the number of flowers in bloom in Floral Valley at 50, while an equal number …

Changes In The Prairie Naturalist For 2017: Some Bumps In The Road During Transition, Christopher N. Jacques

The Prairie Naturalist

By now it is obvious to most of our members and authors that The Prairie Naturalist (TPN) has experienced some delays in conducting journal-related business over the past few months. Publication of the June 2016 issue was slightly delayed and the December 2016 was mailed much later than planned. So I wanted to update our members on the current status, and other aspects, of TPN. As most of you know, when I transitioned into the Editorship of TPN, one of my first orders of business was to secure a new publication venue for the journal. Fortunately, the Department …

Reproductive Characteristics Of Landlocked Fall Chinook Salmon From Lake Oahe, South Dakota, Kelsen L. Young, Michael E. Barnes, Jeremy L. Kientz

The Prairie Naturalist

Lake Oahe, South Dakota, USA, landlocked fall Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) reproductive characteristics were examined over a 27 year period, from 1988 to 2015. Mean total lengths of spawning females ranged from 665 mm (1995) to 812 mm (2015) with considerable year-to-year variation. Post-spawn female weights varied, ranging from 2.02 kg (2000) to 5.55 kg (2015), with an overall mean of 3.04 kg. Fecundity peaked at 4,555 eggs per female in 2003, which was just 3 years after a low of 2,011 eggs per female in 2000. Relative fecundity based on female weight was greatest at 1,211 eggs/kg …

Assessment Of Smallmouth Bass Growth And Mortality In Nebraska Waters, Benjamin J. Schall, Keith D. Koupal, Casey W. Schoenebeck, Keith L. Hurley

The Prairie Naturalist

Smallmouth bass (Micropterus dolomieu) have been introduced across Nebraska into a variety of waterbodies. However, an estimate of smallmouth bass growth and mortality in Nebraska waters has not been produced. The objectives of this study were to use historic sampling data to describe the growth of smallmouth bass in Nebraska lakes in relation to other regional models, growth among waterbody types (reservoirs, Interstate 80 [I-80] lakes, and rivers), estimates of age at quality, preferred, and memorable lengths, and mortality for Nebraska smallmouth bass populations. Mean length ± SE of Nebraska smallmouth bass at age 7 was 383 ± …

Review Of Plants Have So Much To Give Us, All We Have To Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings By Mary Siisip Geniusz (Edited By Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Illustrated By Annmarie Geniusz), Natasha Myhal, Kelly Kindscher

The Prairie Naturalist

Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask offers a new look at Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) ethnobotany as told through traditional stories. Botanical teachings through stories are a way to pass down traditional knowledge from generation to generation. For example, Anishinaabe knowledge on plants was written and recorded in communities willing to share their knowledge with early scholars, such as Albert B. Reagan (1928), Huron H. Smith (1932), and Melvin R. Gilmore (1933). Each of these scholars spent time with an Anishinaabe community to learn about plants and primarily to provide written descriptions of plants …

News From The Bioconductor Project, Bioconductor Core Team

The R Journal

The Bioconductor project provides tools for the analysis and comprehension of high throughput genomic data. Bioconductor 3.4 was released on 18 October, 2016. It is com patible with R 3.3 and consists of 1296 software packages, 309 experiment data packages, and 933 up-to-date annotation packages. The release announcement includes descriptions of 101 new packages, and updated NEWS files for many additional packages. Start using Bioconductor by installing the most recent version of R and evaluating the commands

Weighted Distance Based Discriminant Analysis: The R Package Wedibadis, Itziar Irigoien, Francesc Mestres, Concepcion Arenas

The R Journal

The WeDiBaDis package provides a user friendly environment to perform discriminant analysis (supervised classification). WeDiBaDis is an easy to use package addressed to the biological and medical communities, and in general, to researchers interested in applied studies. It can be suitable when the user is interested in the problem of constructing a discriminant rule on the basis of distances between a relatively small number of instances or units of known unbalanced-class membership measured on many (possibly thousands) features of any type. This is a current situation when analyzing genetic biomedical data. This discriminant rule can then be used both, as …

Diverse: An R Package To Analyze Diversity In Complex Systems, Miguel R. Guevara, Dominik Hartmann, Marcelo Mendoza

The R Journal

The package diverse provides an easy-to-use interface to calculate and visualize different aspects of diversity in complex systems. In recent years, an increasing number of research projects in social and interdisciplinary sciences, including fields like innovation studies, scientometrics, economics, and network science have emphasized the role of diversification and sophistication of socioeconomic systems. However, so far no dedicated package exists that covers the needs of these emerging fields and interdisciplinary teams. Most packages about diversity tend to be created according to the demands and terminology of particular areas of natural and biological sciences. The package diverse uses interdisciplinary concepts of …

Design Of The Tronco Bioconductor Package For Translational Oncology, Marco Antoniotti, Giulio Caravagna, Luca De Sano, Alex Graudenzi, Giancarlo Mauri, Bud Mishra, Daniele Ramazzotti

The R Journal

Models of cancer progression provide insights on the order of accumulation of genetic alterations during cancer development. Algorithms to infer such models from the currently available mutational profiles collected from different cancer patients (cross-sectional data) have been defined in the literature since late the 90s. These algorithms differ in the way they extract a graphical model of the events modelling the progression, e.g., somatic mutations or copy-number alterations.

TRONCO is an R package for TRanslational ONcology which provides a series of functions to assist the user in the analysis of cross-sectional genomic data and, in particular, it implements …

Qpot: An R Package For Stochastic Differential Equation Quasi-Potential Analysis, Christopher M. Moore, Christopher R. Stieha, Ben C. Nolting, Maria K. Cameron, Karen C. Abbott

The R Journal

QPot (pronounced ky oo + p¨ at) is an R package for analyzing two-dimensional systems of stochastic differential equations. It provides users with a wide range of tools to simulate, analyze, and visualize the dynamics of these systems. One of QPot’s key features is the computation of the quasi-potential, an important tool for studying stochastic systems. Quasi-potentials are particularly useful for comparing the relative stabilities of equilibria in systems with alternative stable states. This paper describes QPot’s primary functions, and explains how quasi-potentials can yield insights about the dynamics of stochastic systems. Three worked examples guide users through the application …

Multiplencc: Inverse Probability Weighting Of Nested Case-Control Data, Nathalie C. Støer, Sven Ove Samuelsen

The R Journal

Reuse of controls from nested case-control designs can increase efficiency in many situations, for instance with competing risks or in other multiple endpoints situations. The matching between cases and controls must be broken when controls are to be used for other endpoints. A weighted analysis can then be performed to take care of the biased sampling from the cohort. We present the R package multipleNCC for reuse of controls in nested case-control studies by inverse probability weighting of the partial likelihood. The package handles right-censored, left-truncated and additionally matched data, and varying numbers of sampled controls and the whole analysis …

Editorial, Michael Lawrence

The R Journal

On behalf of the editorial board, I am pleased to publish Volume 8, Issue 2 of the R Journal. This issue contains 33 contributed research articles. Each of them either presents an R package, a specific extension of an R package or applications using R packages available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN, http:://CRAN.R-project.org). This issue highlights the breadth and depth of the R package ecosystem, covering advances in statistical computing and visualization, as well as novel applications of R in specific domains. The authors have described a small but representative sample of the now more than 11000 packages …

Normal Tolerance Interval Procedures In The Tolerance Package, Derek S. Young

The R Journal

Statistical tolerance intervals are used for a broad range of applications, such as quality control, engineering design tests, environmental monitoring, and bioequivalence testing. tolerance is the only R package devoted to procedures for tolerance intervals and regions. Perhaps the most commonly-employed functions of the package involve normal tolerance intervals. A number of new procedures for this setting have been included in recent versions of tolerance. In this paper, we discuss and illustrate the functions that implement these normal tolerance interval procedures, one of which is a new, novel type of operating characteristic curve.

Micompr: An R Package For Multivariate Independent Comparison Of Observations, Nuno Fachada, João Rodrigues, Vitor V. Lopes, Rui C. Martins, Agostinho C. Rosa

The R Journal

The R package micompr implements a procedure for assessing if two or more multivariate samples are drawn from the same distribution. The procedure uses principal component analysis to convert multivariate observations into a set of linearly uncorrelated statistical measures, which are then compared using a number of statistical methods. This technique is independent of the distributional properties of samples and automatically selects features that best explain their differences. The procedure is appropriate for comparing samples of time series, images, spectrometric measures or similar high-dimension multivariate observations

Eicompare: Comparing Ecological Inference Estimates Across Ei And Ei:Rc, Loren Collingwood, Kassra Oskooii, Sergio Garcia-Rios, Matt Barreto

The R Journal

Social scientists and statisticians often use aggregate data to predict individual-level behavior because the latter are not always available. Various statistical techniques have been developed to make inferences from one level (e.g., precinct) to another level (e.g., individual voter) that minimize errors associated with ecological inference. While ecological inference has been shown to be highly problematic in a wide array of scientific fields, many political scientists and analysis employ the techniques when studying voting patterns. Indeed, federal voting rights lawsuits now require such an analysis, yet expert reports are not consistent in which type of ecological inference is used. This …

Calculating Biological Module Enrichment Or Depletion And Visualizing Data On Large-Scale Molecular Maps With Acsnminer And Rnavicell Packages, Paul Deveau, Emmanuel Barillot, Valentina Boeva, Andrei Zinovyev, Eric Bonnet

The R Journal

Biological pathways or modules represent sets of interactions or functional relationships occurring at the molecular level in living cells. A large body of knowledge on pathways is organized in public databases such as the KEGG, Reactome, or in more specialized repositories, the Atlas of Cancer Signaling Network (ACSN) being an example. All these open biological databases facilitate analyses, improving our understanding of cellular systems. We hereby describe ACSNMineR for calculation of enrichment or depletion of lists of genes of interest in biological pathways. ACSNMineR integrates ACSNmolecular pathways gene sets, but can use any gene set encoded as a GMT file, …

Easyroc: An Interactive Web-Tool For Roc Curve Analysis Using R Language Environment, Dincer Goksuluk, Selcuk Korkmaz, Gokmen Zararsiz, A Ergun Karaagaoglu

The R Journal

ROC curve analysis is a fundamental tool for evaluating the performance of a marker in a number of research areas, e.g., biomedicine, bioinformatics, engineering etc., and is frequently used for discriminating cases from controls. There are a number of analysis tools which are used to guide researchers through their analysis. Some of these tools are commercial and provide basic methods for ROC curve analysis while others offer advanced analysis techniques and a command-based user interface, such as the R environment. The R environment includes comprehensive tools for ROC curve analysis; however, using a command-based interface might be challenging and time …

Mixtox: An R Package For Mixture Toxicity Assessment, Xiang-Wei Zhu, Jian-Yi Chen

The R Journal

Mixture toxicity assessment is indeed necessary for humans and ecosystems that are continually exposed to a variety of chemical mixtures. This paper describes an R package, called mixtox, which offers a general framework of curve fitting, mixture experimental design, and mixture toxicity prediction for practitioners in toxicology. The unique features of mixtox include: (1) constructing a uniform table for mixture experimental design; and (2) predicting toxicity of a mixture with multiple components based on reference models such as concentration addition, independent action, and generalized concentration addition. We describe the various functions of the package and provide examples to illustrate their …

Burwell Fall Field Days, Janis Paseka

Nebraska Bird Review

The meeting of2016 NOU Fall Field Days took place at the Burwell Legion Club on Sept. 30–Oct. 2, 2016. There were about 50 in attendance at the meeting, which was organized by Robin Harding, Lanny Randolph, and Betty Grenon.

On Friday evening Chad Christiansen, who works for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Fort Niobrara/Valentine National Wildlife Refuge Complex, spoke about the goals of the Natural Legacy Project to identify a set of priority landscapes that, if properly managed, would conserve the majority of Nebraska's biological diversity. These landscapes, called Biologically Unique Landscapes, were selected based on …

How Do Designers Of The Built Environment Attempt To Make Ecological Sustainability Sensory Legible?, Carly L. Bartow

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework for making ecosystem function and ecologically sustainable design more perceptible or sensible to people through architecture and the built environment. Design features of the Bertschi School Science Wing and the Bullitt Center in Seattle, Washington are incorporated to illustrate the sensory legibility of ecological sustainability criteria.The criteria are available to designers to help educate a building's occupants on environmentally sustainable design and motivate more sustainable behavior.

Our Students’ Minds Matter: Integrating Mindfulness Practices Into Special Education Classrooms, Danielle Magaldi Ph.D., Jennie Park-Taylor Ph.D.

The Journal of Special Education Apprenticeship

This article explores the usefulness of mindfulness practices in special education classrooms. Mindfulness is defined as the ability to regulate and control one’s attention with an orientation toward the present moment. Mindfulness practices of breathing, imagery, movement, reflection, and acceptance exercises are described along with research on the social, behavioral, and attentional effects following mindfulness interventions. The article concludes with practical considerations for special educators considering implementing mindfulness practices into curriculum, along with future directions for mindfulness in the field of special education.

Spatial Pattern Of Genetic Diversity And Selection In The Mhc Class Ii Drb Of Three Neotropical Bat Species, Arielle Salmier, Benoit De Thoisy, Brigitte Crouau-Roy, Vincent Lacoste, Anne Lavergne

KIP Articles

No abstract provided.