Digital Commons Network^™

Out In The Field - Learning About Plant Diversity, Stephani Beyea, Brooke A. Whitworth

Publications

How do we help students understand the world they live in? How do we make the science we teach relevant and relatable to their everyday environment? One approach to making science come alive for students is to engage in place-based education opportunities. Place-based education engages students with their local culture, ecology, and landscapes (PEEC 2010). It encourages students to use the land and resources in their community to learn and to better understand the environment in which they live. Research indicates that place-based education can increase student achievement and help students develop a connection to their environment (PEEC 2010). It …

Impacts Of A Mixed Ungulate Community On Aspen Forests: From Landscape To Leaf, Aaron C. Rhodes

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the differential effects of an ungulate community (cattle, mule deer, and American elk) on aspen (Populus tremuloides) regeneration pre- and post-fire disturbance. It's first chapter examines the differential effects of cattle, mule deer, and American elk on aspen regeneration across variable topography, climate and forest type; aspen dominant to conifer dominant subalpine forests. We found that each ungulate species, if sufficiently numerous, can cause aspen regeneration failure. Also, high elevation, southern aspect and high winter snow pack increase resilience to ungulate herbivory. Chapter two compares the efficacy of four methods of estimating ungulate impact on …

A Multiscale Modeling Study Of Particle Size Effects On The Tissue Penetration Efficacy Of Drug-Delivery Nanoparticles, Mohammad Aminul Islam, Sutapa Barua, Dipak Barua

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Background: Particle size is a key parameter for drug-delivery nanoparticle design. It is believed that the size of a nanoparticle may have important effects on its ability to overcome the transport barriers in biological tissues. Nonetheless, such effects remain poorly understood. Using a multiscale model, this work investigates particle size effects on the tissue distribution and penetration efficacy of drug-delivery nanoparticles.

Results: We have developed a multiscale spatiotemporal model of nanoparticle transport in biological tissues. The model implements a time-adaptive Brownian Dynamics algorithm that links microscale particle-cell interactions and adhesion dynamics to tissue-scale particle dispersion and penetration. The model accounts …

Metabolomic Effects Of Ceo₂, Sio₂ And Cuo Metal Oxide Nanomaterials On Hepg2 Cells, Kirk T. Kitchin, Steve Stirdivant, Brian L. Robinette, Benjamin T. Castellon, Xinhua Liang

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Background: To better assess potential hepatotoxicity of nanomaterials, human liver HepG2 cells were exposed for 3 days to five different CeO₂ (either 30 or 100 μg/ml), 3 SiO₂ based (30 μg/ml) or 1 CuO (3 μg/ml) nanomaterials with dry primary particle sizes ranging from 15 to 213 nm. Metabolomic assessment of exposed cells was then performed using four mass spectroscopy dependent platforms (LC and GC), finding 344 biochemicals.

Results: Four CeO₂, 1 SiO₂ and 1 CuO nanomaterials increased hepatocyte concentrations of many lipids, particularly free fatty acids and monoacylglycerols but only CuO elevated lysolipids and …

Moderators In The Relationship Between Child Maltreatment And Symptoms Of Depression, Sarah Nowalis

Theses

Experiencing child maltreatment is a risk factor for later psychopathology, however, not all survivors of child maltreatment go on to develop mental illness. Therefore, there are likely important moderators that interact with child maltreatment to contribute to the development of psychopathology. The present study examined attachment and stress severity of life events as possible moderators in the association between child maltreatment and later depressive symptomatology in a population of college students. Participants completed measures of attachment, stressful life events, current mood symptoms, and demographic information. An attachment style characterized by anxiety and avoidance, and greater cumulative stress severity were expected …

Classification Of Rest And Active Periods In Actigraphy Data Using Pca, Isaac W. Muns, Yogesh Lad, Ivan G. Guardiola, Matthew S. Thimgan

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper we highlight a clustering algorithm for the purpose of identifying sleep and wake periods directly from actigraphy signals. The paper makes use of statistical Principal Component Analysis to identify periods of rest and activity. The aim of the proposed methodology is to develop a quick and efficient method to determine the sleep duration of an individual. In addition, a robust method that can identify sleep periods in the accelerometer data when duration, time of day varies by individual. A selected group of 10 individual's sensor data consisting of actigraphy from an accelerometer (3-axis), near body temperature, and …

Program Evaluation Of The Large Lecture Retention Enhancement Initiative Pilot Program At Northern Michigan University 2012-2015, Kathryn Johnson

All NMU Master's Theses

The Northern Michigan University Large Lecture Retention Enhancement Initiative (LLREI) three-year pilot program ran from Fall 2012 to Winter 2015. The LLREI served 52 sections of courses consisting of 4,336 students over six semesters. Of that total, 1,390 were freshmen targeted for retention. Between 629-882 total students enrolled in participating courses depending on the semester. The three-year pilot program cost approximately $180,000.

The main goal was to reduce the historically high failure and drop rates in large lecture introductory courses by revamping the content with active learning and supporting the courses with push-in style undergraduate teaching assistants. Eighty-eight percent of …

Better Health Through Horticulture: Using Horticulture To Influence Behavior And Reduce Stress, Rachel Ochylski

All NMU Master's Theses

Horticultural intervention in the form of gardening workshops connect participants to nature while they nurture another living organism. Horticultural intervention provides opportunities to socialize and engage in a meaningful activity, which have been recognized as helpful in the treatment of common mental health difficulties such as depression and anxiety. There is a lack of experimental studies based on quantitative data that focus on the effects of horticulture on holistic human health. The author evaluated the effects of a horticultural intervention on two separate groups, older adults and college students. The behavioral effects of engaging in gardening activities were evaluated using …

From The Reference Desk-Reviews Of Reference Titles, Tom Gilson

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Faculty & Student Perspectives On The Role Of The Library, Diane Hirshberg, Iain Miller

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

How Research Libraries Support The Research Process: From Idea To Publishing, Anne Langley

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Full Page Ads

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Profiles Encouraged-Profiles For 9 People, Two Companies And Four Libraries

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Expert Guide, Cheerleader, Coach, Fake News Combatant: The Many Hats Of Academic Research Librarians In Supporting Students, Roz Tedford

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Collecting To The Core-Chemical Safety In The Academic Lab, Jeremy J. Garritano, Anne Doherty

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Teaching Undergraduate Students To Visualize And Communicate Public Health Data With Infographics, Justin D. Shanks, Betty Izumi, Christina J. Sun, Allea Martin, Carmen Byker Shanks

OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this study was to explore the degree to which an infographic assignment facilitated student learning around health science issues, as well as the ways in which the assignment was an effective teaching tool. The objectives of the assignment were to (1) understand the purposes of and potential uses for infographics, (2) cultivate creative visual communication skills, and (3) disseminate a complex health topic to diverse audiences. The infographic assignment was developed at Montana State University and piloted at Portland State University. Students were assigned to small groups of three or four to create an infographic focused on …

Understanding Neurobiology Of Psychological Trauma; Tips For Working With Transition-Age Youth, Julie M. Rosenzweig, Pauline Jivanjee, Eileen Brennan, Leigh Grover, Anthony Abshire

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

This tip sheet introduces service providers to scientifically-informed findings about brain development and trauma specific to young adults and the implications for trauma-informed interventions and trauma-informed engagement of young people in services.

Precise Dating Of The Middle-To-Upper Paleolithic Transition In Murcia (Spain) Supports Late Neandertal Persistence In Iberia, João Zilhão, Daniela Anesin, Thierry Aubry

KIP Articles

The late persistence in Southern Iberia of a Neandertal-associated Middle Paleolithic is supported by the archeological stratigraphy and the radiocarbon and luminescence dating of three newly excavated localities in the Mula basin of Murcia (Spain). At Cueva Antón, Mousterian layer I-k can be no more than 37,100 years-old. At La Boja, the basal Aurignacian can be no less than 36,500 years-old. The regional Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition process is thereby bounded to the first half of the 37th millennium Before Present, in agreement with evidence from Andalusia, Gibraltar and Portugal. This chronology represents a lag of minimally 3000 years with the …

Mitigating The Tensions Of Teacher Evaluation Through Pragmatism, Scott Sheedlo

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

The Five Dimensions of Teaching and Learning (5 D+) model for teacher evaluation is popular among Michigan school districts as the instrument to satisfy state law requiring districts to evaluate teachers. Veteran English Language Arts (ELA) teacher Scott Sheedlo gives a first-hand, narrative account of the questions and tensions implementation of the 5D+ model has caused for him as his district has adopted the model. Sheedlo notes this state mandate has resulted in the typical manifestations of teacher resistance, as the model is at odds with his own metrics for good teaching and includes unfamiliar, research-based practices such as formative …

Sleep Benefits Memory For Semantic Category Structure While Preserving Exemplar-Specific Information, Anna C. Schapiro, Elizabeth A. Mcdevitt, Lang Chen, Kenneth A. Norman, Sara C. Mednick, Timothy T. Rogers

Psychology

Semantic memory encompasses knowledge about both the properties that typify concepts (e.g. robins, like all birds, have wings) as well as the properties that individuate conceptually related items (e.g. robins, in particular, have red breasts). We investigate the impact of sleep on new semantic learning using a property inference task in which both kinds of information are initially acquired equally well. Participants learned about three categories of novel objects possessing some properties that were shared among category exemplars and others that were unique to an exemplar, with exposure frequency varying across categories. In Experiment 1, memory for shared properties improved …

Influence Of Gender And Age On The Performance Of A Pbis Program: Quantitative Analysis Of Secondary Data From A Midwestern Suburban Public Middle School, Ibrahima Coulibaly

Dissertations

The Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support, or PBIS, represented the new trend in dealing with problem behavior in educational settings. The concepts of Gender and Age intertwined with many social, ethnic, and cultural attributes, which affected students’ behaviors in group settings such as school. The resolve of this study resided in the investigation of the effects of gender and age (grade level) on the effectiveness of a PBIS program. In addition, the study reviewed the relative quality of validity among the components used in the PBIS program. The data used in this study originated from a PBIS program implemented at …

Effectiveness Of Composting As A Biosecure Disposal Method For Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus (Pedv)-Infected Pig Carcasses, Sarah Vitosh-Sillman, John Dustin Loy, Bruce Brodersen, Clayton Kelling, Kent M. Eskridge, Amy Millmier Schmidt

School of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences: Faculty Publications

Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) is an enteric disease of swine that has emerged as a worldwide threat to swine herd health and production. Substantial research has been conducted to assess viability of the virus on surfaces of vehicles and equipment, in feed and water, and on production building surfaces, but little is known about the persistence in PEDV-infected carcasses and effective disposal methods thereof. This study was conducted to quantify the persistence of PEDV RNA via quantitative real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) at various time-temperature combinations and in infected piglet carcasses subjected to composting. Although this method …

Factors Associated With Hiv Testing Among Young Men Who Have Sex With Men In Myanmar: A Cross-Sectional Study, Minh D. Pham, Poe Poe Aung, Aye Kyawt Paing, Naanki Pasricha, Paul A. Agius, Waimar Tun, Ashish Bajracharya, Stanley Luchters

Population Health, East Africa

Introduction: In Myanmar, men who have sex with men (MSM) experience high risk of HIV infection. However, access to HIV testing and prevention services remains a challenge among this marginalized population. The objective of this study was to estimate population prevalence and correlates of prior HIV testing among young MSM (YMSM) and informs the development of HIV testing and intervention programmes that respond to the specific needs of this population.

Methods: Five hundred and eighty-five YMSM aged 18 to 24 years were recruited using respondent-driven sampling (RDS) in a cross-sectional survey conducted in six townships of Myanmar. RDS-adjusted population estimates …

Endothelial Cell-Derived Microparticles From Patients With Obstructive Sleep Apnea Hypoxia Syndrome And Coronary Artery Disease Increase Aortic Endothelial Cell Dysfunction., Lixin Jia, Jingyao Fan, Wei Cui, Sa Liu, Na Li, Wayne Bond Lau, Xin-Liang Ma, Jie Du, Shaoping Nie, Yongxiang Wei

Department of Emergency Medicine Faculty Papers

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Obstructive sleep apnea hypoxia syndrome (OSAHS) is an independent risk factor for coronary artery disease (CAD). Treatment of OSAHS improves clinical outcome in some CAD patients, but the relationship between OSAHS and CAD is complex. Microparticles (MPs) are shed by the plasma membrane by either physiologic or pathologic stimulation. In the current study, we investigated the role of MPs in the context of OSAHS.

METHODS AND RESULTS: 54 patients with both suspected coronary artery stenosis and OSAHS were recruited and underwent both coronary arteriography and polysomnography. Circulating MPs were isolated and analyzed by flow cytometry. CAD+OSAHS patients exhibited greater …

Determination Of Primordial And Anthropogenic Radionuclide Concentrations In Agricultural Soil Of The United Arab Emirates Using Gamma-Ray Spectrometry, Rahaf Moutaz Billah Ajaj

Theses

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has initiated the first civilian nuclear power plant, and it will be operating four reactors between (2018-2020). The establishment of Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which will employ the nuclear power to generate clean energy, is a significant step forward minimizing the UAE carbon footprint. Before the construction of any regulated nuclear facility, it is essential to investigate the environmental background radiation level in the country. Such an investigation is critical for providing the background data for the environmental impact assessment of the nuclear facility. The present study represents the first research effort in the (UAE) …

Eeg-Based Emotion Recognition Via Fast And Robust Feature Smoothing, Cheng Tang, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electroencephalograph (EEG) signals reveal much of our brain states and have been widely used in emotion recognition. However, the recognition accuracy is hardly ideal mainly due to the following reasons: (i) the features extracted from EEG signals may not solely reflect one’s emotional patterns and their quality is easily affected by noise; and (ii) increasing feature dimension may enhance the recognition accuracy, but it often requires extra computation time. In this paper, we propose a feature smoothing method to alleviate the aforementioned problems. Specifically, we extract six statistical features from raw EEG signals and apply a simple yet cost-effective feature …

Detecting Semantic Uncertainty By Learning Hedge Cues In Sentences Using An Hmm, Xiujun Li, Wei Gao, Jude Shavlik

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Detecting speculative assertions is essential to distinguish semantically uncertain information from the factual ones in text. This is critical to the trustworthiness of many intelligent systems that are based on information retrieval and natural language processing techniques, such as question answering or information extraction. We empirically explore three fundamental issues of uncertainty detection: (1) the predictive ability of different learning methods on this task; (2) whether using unlabeled data can lead to a more accurate model; and (3) whether closed-domain training or crossdomain training is better. For these purposes, we adopt two statistical learning approaches to this problem: the commonly …

Intent Recognition In Smart Living Through Deep Recurrent Neural Networks, Xiang Zhang, Lina Yao, Chaoran Huang, Quan Z. Sheng, Xianzhi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electroencephalography (EEG) signal based intent recognition has recently attracted much attention in both academia and industries, due to helping the elderly or motor-disabled people controlling smart devices to communicate with outer world. However, the utilization of EEG signals is challenged by low accuracy, arduous and time-consuming feature extraction. This paper proposes a 7-layer deep learning model to classify raw EEG signals with the aim of recognizing subjects’ intents, to avoid the time consumed in pre-processing and feature extraction. The hyper-parameters are selected by an Orthogonal Array experiment method for efficiency. Our model is applied to an open EEG dataset provided …

Highly Efficient Mining Of Overlapping Clusters In Signed Weighted Networks, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many practical contexts, networks are weighted as their links are assigned numerical weights representing relationship strengths or intensities of inter-node interaction. Moreover, the links' weight can be positive or negative, depending on the relationship or interaction between the connected nodes. The existing methods for network clustering however are not ideal for handling very large signed weighted networks. In this paper, we present a novel method called LPOCSIN (short for "Linear Programming based Overlapping Clustering on Signed Weighted Networks") for efficient mining of overlapping clusters in signed weighted networks. Different from existing methods that rely on computationally expensive cluster cohesiveness …

To Swim Or Not To Swim: A Population-Level Model Of Xenopus Tadpole Decision Making And Locomotor Behaviour, R Borisyuk, R Merrison-Hort, Sr Soffe, S Koutsikou, W-C Li

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

We present a detailed computational model of interacting neuronal populations that mimic the hatchling Xenopus tadpole nervous system. The model includes four sensory pathways, integrators of sensory information, and a central pattern generator (CPG) network. Sensory pathways of different modalities receive inputs from an "environment"; these inputs are then processed and integrated to select the most appropriate locomotor action. The CPG populations execute the selected action, generating output in motor neuron populations. Thus, the model describes a detailed and biologically plausible chain of information processing from external signals to sensors, sensory pathways, integration and decision-making, action selection and execution and …