Digital Commons Network^™

The Protective Roles Of Primary And Secondary Control Strategies Among Familial Caregivers Of Older Adults With Dementia, Nicole Haverstock

Theses and Dissertations

Caring for an older family member with dementia can be extremely stressful, often resulting in diminished psychological health. Prior research has shown that a strong sense of control protects well-being during stressful times. Therefore, greater perceived control may serve to buffer the effects of stress on familial caregivers’ psychological health. According to control theorists (Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995; Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982), a general sense of control is maintained through a dual process involving direct attempts to change the environment (i.e., primary control strategies) and attempts to inwardly adjust cognitions to align with the environment (i.e., secondary control strategies). …

Concealing Stigmatized Sexual Orientation, Accepting Versus Non-Accepting Attitudes, And Ego Depletion, Nicole Gigi Giordano

Theses and Dissertations

The current study was designed with the aim of increasing the understanding of

how concealing or disclosing a stigmatized sexual identity to a perceived accepting/non- accepting person affects ego depletion. Ego Depletion, (Baumeister, 1998) refers to the idea that certain tasks exhaust a limited pool of cognitive resources. Previous literature has explored how concealing a stigmatized identity is ego depleting; however, an examination of the relationship between ego depletion and the concealment of the specific identity as a sexual minority has not yet been explored. LGBQ individuals are often faced with the challenge of navigating social situations to determine if …

Anomie In The Oil Patch? An Examination Of Durkheim’S Anomie Theory Through A Case Study Of The Bakken Region, Fred Matthew Jones

Theses and Dissertations

Emile Durkheim serves as one of the seminal contributors to the field of sociology; his contributions to criminology are numerous as well. Many authors consider Durkheim’s concept of anomie to be his most important contribution to the field of criminology (Lunden, 1972). Durkheim’s anomie theory has been subject to extensive empirical examination, these efforts have resulted in disparate findings. Graeff and Mehlkop (2007) insist this lack of coherence is due to improper operationalization of Durkheim’s anomie by some researchers. In particular, it is the utilization of cross sectional data in these previous studies which contributes to these disparate results. The …

The Development Of Hostile Cognitive Schemas And Adult Aggressive Tendencies, Kristin Elisabeth Matson

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation research served as an exploration into the relationships between childhood maltreatment, personality factors (i.e. negative affect and antagonism), cognitive biases (i.e. hostile attribution bias and hypermasculinity), adult aggression, and gun enthusiasm. Previous literature has shown relationships between these variables individually and this research attempted to provide more insight into the complicated interplay between numerous factors often present in the life of an aggressive adult. The participants included 885 men over the age of 18 and residing in the United States who were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk survey service to complete eight assessments online. Results indicated aggressive ideation …

Effects Of Plant Community Structure, Soil Components, And Aboveground Fungal Presence On Grassland Productivity, Thomas Mckenna

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how aspects of the resident plant community affect grassland productivity. Chapter One gives an overview of how grassland productivity can be affected by the structural components of a plant community, abiotic and biotic soil components, and the presence of aboveground fungi. In Chapter Two, I present results of an experiment where the frequency of interspecific interactions in plant communities was altered along richness and evenness gradients by either randomly placing species in plots (dispersed plots) or by aggregating species in groups of four individuals (aggregated plots). Results suggest aggregation decreased productivity by promoting species coexistence and not …

Improving Far-Uv Cd Prediction With The Dipole Interaction Model, Akongnwi Cheo Jungong

Theses and Dissertations

Among the physical methods available for studying protein structures, CD stands out as a property that is easy to measure yet remarkably difficult to predict theoretically. The basic principle underlying the CD of polypeptides and proteins is reasonably understood: the mixing of electronic transitions of monomer groups in the context of a chiral environment of helices gives rise to transitions that are both electronically and magnetically allowed. Despite knowledge on the fundamentals of CD, accurate theoretical prediction is still a major challenge. A better theoretical understanding of protein CD would facilitate a fuller interpretation of protein CD experiments.

Extensive theoretical …

Teacher Referral Following Natural Disasters, Melissa Anne Quincer

Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has shown that teachers are common referral points for children

experiencing mental health difficulties. This is especially true in rural communities and a

major time of intervention has been following natural disasters, when there are not

enough mental health services in an area, or they are too taxed. This study sought to

explore teachers’ referral habits and determine if there is any difference when rural

challenges are present or if the teacher has previously experienced a disaster. To this end,

teachers were recruited, presented with vignettes that either contained rural challenges or

did not contain rural challenges and …

Jealousy In Same-Sex Relationships: A Study Of Sexual And Emotional Infidelity, Courtney Grace Stufflebeam

Theses and Dissertations

The current study employed online, self-report data in relation to jealousy, insecurity, dependency, and relationship power within same-sex relationships. Specifically, I examined the correlational, predictive and comparative aspects of distress and jealousy levels in individuals within same-sex relationships. It was hypothesized that relationship power, dependency and insecurity would predict level of jealousy and distress in the experience of sexual and emotional infidelity. Three hundred and nineteen consenting participants completed the online questionnaires regarding their views and emotions related to the above constructs. Regression analyses provided data indicating that none of the variables predicted an individual’s experience of jealousy and distress. …

X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy Studies Of The Atomic Structure Of Zirconium-Doped Lithium Silicate Glasses And Glass-Ceramics, Zirconium-Doped Lithium Borate Glasses, And Vitreous Rare-Earth Phosphates, Changhyeon Yoo

Theses and Dissertations

In the first part of this work, the atomic-scale structure around rare-earth (RE = Pr, Nd, Eu, Dy, and Er) cations (RE3+) in rare-earth sodium ultraphosphate (REUP) glasses were investigated using RE LIII-edge (RE = Nd, Er, Dy, and Eu) and K-edge (RE = Pr and Dy) Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy. (RE2O3)x(Na2O)y(P2O5)1-x-y glasses in the compositional range 0 ≤ x ≤ 0.14 and 0.3 ≤ x + y ≤ 0.4 were studied. For the nearest oxygen shell, the RE-oxygen (RE-O) coordination number decreases from 10.8 to 6.5 with increasing RE content for Pr-, Nd-, Dy-, and Er-doped …

No Good Options Against Isis Barbarism? Human Shields In 21st Century Conflicts, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most vexing conundrums of 21st century warfare has been not just the explosive growth in the use of human shields, but the apparent systemization of the tactic, particularly by nonstate actors. In noting the international prohibition, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) defines the practice as the “intentional co-location of military objectives and civilians or persons hors de combat with the specific intent of trying to prevent the targeting of those military objectives.”

Policies And Clinical Practices Regarding Candidacy And Auditory Treatment For Hispanic Pediatric Patients In Cochlear Implant Centers In The United States, Matthew Ehrenburg

Senior Independent Study Theses

This research sought to investigate the policies and clinical practices regarding candidacy and auditory treatment for Hispanic pediatric cochlear implant patients at cochlear implant centers in the United States. More specifically, the study investigated treatment services provided to pediatric patients who are raised in monolingual Spanish, English as a second language (ESL), and bilingual English-Spanish speaking homes. The study made use of survey research to examine cochlear implant centers regarding their policies, clinical practices, and their referral processes for this specific group of cochlear implant recipients. The survey was distributed electronically through the online survey software Qualtrics via email to …

Gvsu Undergraduate And Graduate Catalog, 2016-2017, Grand Valley State University

Course Catalogs, 1963 - Current

Grand Valley State University 2016-2017 undergraduate and/or graduate course catalog published annually to provide students with information and guidance for enrollment.

"The More Things Change . . .": New Moves For Legitimizing Racial Discrimination In A "Post-Race" World, Mario L. Barnes

Articles

No abstract provided.

Privacy, Public Disclosure, Police Body Cameras: Policy Splits, Mary D. Fan

Articles

When you call the police for help—or someone calls the police on you—do you bear the risk that your worst moments will be posted on YouTube for public viewing? Police officers enter some of the most intimate incidences of our lives—after an assault, when we are drunk and disorderly, when someone we love dies in an accident, when we are distraught, enraged, fighting, and more. As police officers around the nation begin wearing body cameras in response to calls for greater transparency, communities are wrestling with how to balance privacy with public disclosure.

This Article sheds light on the balances …

Until The Client Speaks: Reviving The Legal-Interest Model For Preverbal Children, Lisa Kelly, Alicia Levezu

Articles

This article seeks to revive and develop further the concept of legalinterest advocacy, which was first introduced by the American Bar Association in 1996. This overlooked model offers a workable alternative to both the best-interest and substituted-judgment representation models for preverbal clients. Through legal-interest advocacy, attorneys for preverbal children are charged with ensuring that the many rights given to infants are enforced, while withdrawing from attorneys the ability to impose their values on the child client. This article outlines how legal-interest advocacy representation can ensure that a child's legal rights are protected and preserved until the child client can speak …

Model Lessons For Math And Geography Activities, Karen Adams, Tyler Sexton, Shawnti Peachey

Instructional Materials

Model Lessons for Math and Geography Activities to use with The Student Atlas of Oregon.

What Is (And Isn't) Healthism?, Jessica L. Roberts, Elizabeth W. Leonard

Georgia Law Review

What does it mean to discriminateon the basis of health status? Health can, of course, speak to a number of things, such as the length of our lives, our ability to perform mentally and physically, our need for health care, and our risk of injury and incapacity. But the mere relevance of a particular attribute does not mean that considering it should be legally permissible. This Article explores when differentiating on the basis of health is acceptable- perhaps even desirable-and, by contrast, when it is normatively problematic. While we acknowledge that differentiations on the basis of health status can be …

Hepatitis C Virus In Mexican Americans: A Population-Based Study Reveals Relatively High Prevalence And Negative Association With Diabetes, Gordon P. Watt, Kristina Vatcheva, Laura Beretta, Jen-Jung Pan, Michael Fallon, Joseph B. Mccormick, Susan P. Fisher-Hoch

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

This study aimed to estimate the prevalence and risk factors for hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in Mexican Americans living in South Texas. We tested plasma for the presence of HCV antibody from the Cameron County Hispanic Cohort (CCHC), a randomized, population-based cohort in an economically disadvantaged Mexican American community on the United States/Mexico border with high rates of chronic disease. A weighted prevalence of HCV antibody of 2·3% [n = 1131, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1·2-3·4] was found. Participants with diabetes had low rates of HCV antibody (0·4%, 95% CI 0·0-0·9) and logistic regression revealed a statistically significant negative …

The Function Of Field Study: Comparison Of Limited And Full Field Experience Courses, Lauren Fine, Telyn Peterson, Mat Duerden, Riley Nelson, John Bennion

Faculty Publications

Fieldwork, an experiential and outdoor component of a traditional lecture class, has been effective in improving students’ content knowledge and attitudes. However, most studies of these courses use a full lecture course as the comparison group rather than comparing amounts or types of fieldwork. This study compares two classes that incorporate fieldwork (n = 18 and 12 participants, respectively) and uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze changes in content knowledge, self-efficacy, and perceived value of the subject (entomology). Pre-and post-test scores suggest that information memorization is best taught in a traditional classroom environment. Qualitative data illustrate that the …

Influence Of Neural Network Training Parameters On Short-Term Wind Forecasting, Adel Brka, Yasir M. Al-Abdeli, Ganesh Kothapalli

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper investigates factors which can affect the accuracy of short-term wind speed prediction when done over long periods spanning different seasons. Two types of neural networks (NNs) are used to forecast power generated via specific horizontal axis wind turbines. Meteorological data used are for a specific Western Australian location. Results reveal that seasonal variations affect the prediction accuracy of the wind resource, but the magnitude of this influence strongly depends on the details of the NN deployed. Factors investigated include the span of the time series needed to initially train the networks, the temporal resolution of these data, the …

Should We Sync? Seascape-Level Genetic And Ecological Factors Determine Seagrass Flowering Patterns, Marlene Jahnke, Jordi F. Pagès, Teresa Alcoverro, Paul S. Lavery, Kathryn M. Mcmahon, Gabriele Procaccini

Research Datasets

Spatial and temporal heterogeneity in flowering occur in many plant species with abiotic pollination and may confer fitness advantages through mechanisms such as predator satiation or pollination efficiency. Environmental factors such as light quality or quantity and temperature play an important role in inducing synchronisation on wide geographic scales. On a smaller geographic scale, external factors such as resource availability and herbivory are theorised to trigger flowering, while genetic factors may also play an important role. In this study, we assessed the importance of ecological and genetic factors in shaping seascape-level spatial heterogeneity in flowering of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica. …

Rcd+: Fast Loop Modeling Server, José R. López-Blanco, Alejandro J. Canosa-Valis, Yaohang Li, Pablo Chacón

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Modeling loops is a critical and challenging step in protein modeling and prediction. We have developed a quick online service (http://rcd.chaconlab.org) for ab initio loop modeling combining a coarse-grained conformational search with a full-atom refinement. Our original Random Coordinate Descent (RCD) loop closure algorithm has been greatly improved to enrich the sampling distribution towards near-native conformations. These improvements include a new workflow optimization, MPI-parallelization and fast backbone angle sampling based on neighbor-dependent Ramachandran probability distributions. The server starts by efficiently searching the vast conformational space from only the loop sequence information and the environment atomic coordinates. The generated closed loop …

Flexc: Protein Flexibility Prediction Using Context-Based Statistics, Predicted Structural Features, And Sequence Information, Ashraf Yaseen, Mais Nijim, Brandon Williams, Lei Qian, Min Li, Jianxin Wang, Yaohang Li

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The fluctuation of atoms around their average positions in protein structures provides important information regarding protein dynamics. This flexibility of protein structures is associated with various biological processes. Predicting flexibility of residues from protein sequences is significant for analyzing the dynamic properties of proteins which will be helpful in predicting their functions.

Deep Models For Brain Em Image Segmentation: Novel Insights And Improved Performance, Ahmed Fakhry, Hanchuan Peng, Shuiwang Ji

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Motivation: Accurate segmentation of brain electron microscopy (EM) images is a critical step in dense circuit reconstruction. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely used in a number of applications in computer vision, most of these models that proved to be effective on image classification tasks cannot be applied directly to EM image segmentation, due to the different objectives of these tasks. As a result, it is desirable to develop an optimized architecture that uses the full power of DNNs and tailored specifically for EM image segmentation.

Results: In this work, we proposed a novel design of DNNs for …

Examining The Potential Clinical Value Of Curcumin In The Prevention And Diagnosis Of Alzheimer's Disease, K. G. Goozee, T. M. Shah, Hamid R. Sohrabi, Stephanie Rainey-Smith, B. Brown, Guiseppe Verdile, Ralph Martins

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Curcumin derived from turmeric is well documented for its anti-carcinogenic, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Recent studies show that curcumin also possesses neuroprotective and cognitive-enhancing properties that may help delay or prevent neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Currently, clinical diagnosis of AD is onerous, and it is primarily based on the exclusion of other causes of dementia. In addition, phase III clinical trials of potential treatments have mostly failed, leaving disease-modifying interventions elusive. AD can be characterised neuropathologically by the deposition of extracellular β amyloid (Aβ) plaques and intracellular accumulation of tau-containing neurofibrillary tangles. Disruptions in Aβ metabolism/clearance contribute to …

Genetic Model, Feifei Zhao, Manshu Song, Youxin Wang, Wei Wang

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

No abstract provided.

Individual And Population-Level Responses To Ocean Acidification, Ben P. Harvey, Niall J. Mckeown, Samuel P. Rastrick, Camilla Bertolini, Andy Foggo, Helen Graham, Jason M. Hall-Spencer, Marco Milazzo, Paul W. Shaw, Daniel P. Small, Philippa J. Moore

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Ocean acidification is predicted to have detrimental effects on many marine organisms and ecological processes. Despite growing evidence for direct impacts on specific species, few studies have simultaneously considered the effects of ocean acidification on individuals (e.g. consequences for energy budgets and resource partitioning) and population level demographic processes. Here we show that ocean acidification increases energetic demands on gastropods resulting in altered energy allocation, i.e. reduced shell size but increased body mass. When scaled up to the population level, long-term exposure to ocean acidification altered population demography, with evidence of a reduction in the proportion of females in the …

Stick Or Switch: A Selection Heuristic Predicts When People Take The Perspective Of Others Or Communicate Egocentrically, Shane Rogers, Nicholas Fay

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper examines a cognitive mechanism that drives perspective-taking and egocentrism in interpersonal communication. Using a conceptual referential communication task, in which participants describe a range of abstract geometric shapes, Experiment 1 shows that perspective-taking and egocentric communication are frequent communication strategies. Experiment 2 tests a selection heuristic account of perspective-taking and egocentric communication. It uses participants' shape description ratings to predict their communication strategy. Participants' communication strategy was predicted by how informative they perceived the different shape descriptions to be. When participants' personal shape description was perceived to be more informative than their addressee's shape description, there was a …

Profiling Igg N-Glycans As Potential Biomarker Of Chronological And Biological Ages: A Community-Based Study In A Han Chinese Population, Xinwei Yu, Youix Wang, Jasminka Krištić, Jing Dong, Xi Chu, Siqi Ge, Hao Wang, Honghong Fang, Qing Gao, Di Lui, Zhongya Zhao, Hongli Peng, Maja P. Baković, Lijuan Wu, Manshu Song, Igor Rudan, Harry Campbell, Gordan Lauc, Wei Wang

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

As an important post-translation modifying process, glycosylation significantly affects the structure and function of immunoglobulin G (IgG) molecules and is essential in many steps of the inflammatory cascade. Studies have demonstrated the potential of using glycosylation features of IgG as a component of predictive biomarkers for chronological age in several European populations, whereas no study has been reported in Chinese. Herein, we report various patterns of changes in IgG glycosylation associated with age by analyzing IgG glycosylation in 701 community-based Han Chinese (244 males, 457 females; 23-68 years old). Eleven IgG glycans, including FA2B, A2G1, FA2[6]G1, FA2[3]G1, FA2[6]BG1, FA2[3]BG1, A2G2, …

Floating Constructed Wetland For The Treatment Of Polluted River Water: A Pilot Scale Study On Seasonal Variation And Shock Load, Tanveer Saeed, Biprojit Paul, Rumana Afrin,, Abdullah Al-Muyeed, Guangzhi Sun

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper reports the performance of a pilot scale floating constructed wetland (FCW), employed for the treatment of polluted water collected from Buriganga river in Bangladesh. The FCW system included a tank for accommodating collected water and a floating mat with media, to support the growth of two macrophyte species Phragmites australis and Canna indica. Mean mass removal rates of 0.66, 0.76, 0.08, 0.51, 2.49g/m2d were achieved for ammoniacal nitrogen (NH4-N), total inorganic nitrogen (TIN), phosphorus (P), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), respectively by the FCW. Nitrogen removal was via nitrification-denitrification processes, whereas filtration-sedimentation appeared to influence …