Digital Commons Network^™

Clinical Perspectives On Incorporating Cardiorespiratory Fitness In Clinical Practice, Mary T. Imboden, Lynn A. Witty, Mitchell H. Whaley, Matthew P. Harber, Bradley S. Fleenor, Leonard A. Kaminsky

Faculty Publications - Department of Kinesiology

Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) has been documented as a strong, independent predictor of non-communicable disease and mortality in both clinical and apparently healthy populations. This well-established relationship has impelled organizations, including the American Heart Association, to release scientific statements highlighting the importance of accurate quantification of CRF. Current knowledge of the relationship between CRF and mortality is predominantly based on estimated CRF obtained from varying indirect methods. Cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPX), the gold standard method of CRF measurement, provides a more accurate and reliable quantification of CRF compared to estimated methods. This review provides support for the diagnostic and prognostic use …

Novel Fluorescent Fluorene-Containing Conjugated Polymers: Synthesis, Photophysical Properties, And Application For The Detection Of Common Bisphenols, Daniel R. Jones, Ryan Vallee, Mindy Levine

Chemistry Faculty Publications

Eight new fluorescent conjugated polymers were synthesized by the Suzuki polycondensation reaction of 9,9-dioctylfluorene-2,7-diboronic acid bis(1,3-propanediol) ester and a conjugated dihalogenated monomer. The photophysical properties of these polymers were investigated as well-dissolved solutions in chloroform and as nanoparticle suspensions in water. Several of the polymers had large Stokes shifts (greater than 100 nm) and others demonstrated unique changes in the fluorescence properties in aggregated verse nonaggregated forms. Preliminary applications of these polymers in the detection of common bisphenols are also reported.

Supramolecular Luminescent Sensors, Teresa L. Mako, Joan M. Racicot, Mindy Levine

Chemistry Faculty Publications

There is great need for stand-alone luminescence-based chemosensors that exemplify selectivity, sensitivity, and applicability and that overcome the challenges that arise from complex, real-world media. Discussed herein are recent developments toward these goals in the field of supramolecular luminescent chemosensors, including macrocycles, polymers, and nanomaterials. Specific focus is placed on the development of new macrocycle hosts since 2010, coupled with considerations of the underlying principles of supramolecular chemistry as well as analytes of interest and common luminophores. State-of-the-art developments in the fields of polymer and nanomaterial sensors are also examined, and some remaining unsolved challenges in the area of chemosensors …

Learning Beyond The Binary: Gender Non-Conforming Students At Humboldt State University, Lizbeth Olmedo, Meredith Williams

University Reports

No abstract provided.

Vol. 43, No. 4: Holiday 2018, School Of Medicine & Health Sciences

North Dakota Medicine Archive

No abstract provided.

Resource Assessment Report Western Australian Octopus Resource, Anthony M. Hart, Daniel Murphy, Alastair Harry, E. A. Fisher

WA Marine Stewardship Council report series

This document provides a cumulative description and assessment of the Octopus Resource and all of the fishing activities (i.e. fisheries / fishing sectors) affecting this resource in Western Australia (WA). The overall resource essentially comprises a single species of octopus, Octopus aff. tetricus, which occurs in inshore waters to 70 m depth from Shark Bay to Esperance.

Reflection: Peggy Machado Donelly, "Ten Things I Am Grateful For At Salve", Margaret Machado Donelly

Class of 1968 Legacy Project

No abstract provided.

Reflection: Judy Gray Holcomb, Judith A. Gray Holcomb

Class of 1968 Legacy Project

No abstract provided.

Existing And Potential Statistical And Computational Approaches For The Analysis Of 3d Ct Images Of Plant Roots, Zheng Xu, Camilo Valdes, Jennifer Clarke

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

Scanning technologies based on X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) have been widely used in many scientific fields including medicine, nanosciences and materials research. Considerable progress in recent years has been made in agronomic and plant science research thanks to X-ray CT technology. X-ray CT image-based phenotyping methods enable high-throughput and non-destructive measuring and inference of root systems, which makes downstream studies of complex mechanisms of plants during growth feasible. An impressive amount of plant CT scanning data has been collected, but how to analyze these data efficiently and accurately remains a challenge. We review statistical and computational approaches that have been …

Development Of 11-Plex Mol-Pcr Assay For The Rapid Screening Of Samples For Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia Coli, Travis A. Woods, Heather M. Mendez, Sandy Ortega, Xiaorong Shi, David Marx, Jianfa Bai, Rodney A. Moxley, T. G. Nagaraja, Steven W. Graves, Alina Deshpande

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

Strains of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) are a serious threat to the health, with approximately half of the STEC related food-borne illnesses attributable to contaminated beef. We developed an assay that was able to screen samples for several important STEC associated serogroups (O26, O45, O103, O104, O111, O121, O145, O157) and three major virulence factors (eae, stx1, stx2) in a rapid and multiplexed format using the Multiplex oligonucleotide ligation-PCR (MOL-PCR) assay chemistry. This assay detected unique STEC DNA signatures and is meant to be used on samples from various sources related to beef production, providing a multiplex and high-throughput …

Application Of Transfer Learning For Cancer Drug Sensitivity Prediction, Saugato Rahman Dhruba, Raziur Rahman, Kevin Matlock, Souparno Ghosh, Ranadip Pal

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

Background: In precision medicine, scarcity of suitable biological data often hinders the design of an appropriate predictive model. In this regard, large scale pharmacogenomics studies, like CCLE and GDSC hold the promise to mitigate the issue. However, one cannot directly employ data from multiple sources together due to the existing distribution shift in data. One way to solve this problem is to utilize the transfer learning methodologies tailored to fit in this specific context.

Results: In this paper, we present two novel approaches for incorporating information from a secondary database for improving the prediction in a target database. The first …

Investigation Of Model Stacking For Drug Sensitivity Prediction, Kevin Matlock, Carlos De Niz, Raziur Rahman, Souparno Ghosh, Ranadip Pal

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

Background: A significant problem in precision medicine is the prediction of drug sensitivity for individual cancer cell lines. Predictive models such as Random Forests have shown promising performance while predicting from individual genomic features such as gene expressions. However, accessibility of various other forms of data types including information on multiple tested drugs necessitates the examination of designing predictive models incorporating the various data types.

Results: We explore the predictive performance of model stacking and the effect of stacking on the predictive bias and squarred error. In addition we discuss the analytical underpinnings supporting the advantages of stacking in reducing …

The Aboriginal Alibi: Governing Dispossession In Colonial Bombay, Sheetal Chhabria

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Function Mining For The $$-N$_{Ch}$ Correlations In Pp And Pp(Bar) Collisions Based On Symbolic Regression, Elsayed Eldahshan

Turkish Journal of Physics

The investigation and analysis of the correlation between the mean transverse momentum () of charged particles and the charged particle multiplicity ($N_{ch}$) allow physicists to understand the contribution of multiple-parton interactions to the particle production mechanism. A symbolic regression (SR) method, based on gene expression programming (GEP), is proposed for mining a function that describes the -$N_{ch}$ correlation in proton-proton and proton-antiproton (pp and pp(bar)) collisions at collision energies from IRS to LHC. The discovered function simulates and models the correlation between and $N_{ch}$ in wide energy range $s^{1/2}$. In the framework of the proposed GEP model for $-N_{ch}$ correlation, …

Analysis Of Praxis Physics Subject Assessment Examinees And Performance: Who Are Our Prospective Physics Teachers?, Herman Ray

Faculty Articles

A generally agreed upon tenant of the physics teaching community is the centrality of subject-specific expertise in effective teaching. However, studies which assess the content knowledge of incoming K–12 physics teachers in the U.S. have not yet been reported. Similarly lacking are studies on if or how the demographic makeup of aspiring physics educators is different from previously reported analyses of the actual high school physics teaching workforce. Here we present findings about the demographics and subject knowledge of prospective high school physics teachers using data from Praxis physics subject assessments administered between 2006 and 2016. Our analysis reveals significant …

When I Left The Darwin Day Committee, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Empowering Medicine, The 2018 Annual Report Of The Jackson Laboratory, The Jackson Laboratory

Annual Reports

The 2018 Annual Report from The Jackson Laboratory (JAX), which highlights some of the major events and accomplishments of the year.

Muddy Waters: Refining The Way Forward For The “Sustainability Science” Of Socio-Hydrogeology, Paul Hynds, Shane Regan, Luisa Andrade, Simon Mooney, Kevin O'Malley, Stephanie Dipelino, Jean O'Dwyer

Articles

The trouble with groundwater is that despite its critical importance to global water supplies, it frequently attracts insufficient management attention relative to more visible surface water sources, irrespective of regional climate, socioeconomic profile, and regulatory environment. To this end, the recently defined sub-discipline of "socio-hydrogeology", an extension of socio-hydrology, seeks to translate and exchange knowledge with and between non-expert end-users, in addition to involving non-expert opinion and experience in hydrogeological investigations, thus emphasising a "bottom-up" methodology. It is widely acknowledged that issues pertaining to groundwater quality, groundwater quantity, climate change, and a poor general awareness and understanding of groundwater occurrence …

The Influence Of Family Communication Styles On Campus Experience In College-Aged Children, Madison Kjosa

Honors Undergraduate Theses

As an environment, the modern university setting is diverse and subject students to numerous challenges and opportunities that prepare them to enter careers, build families, and grow as an individual. Yet what a student experiences in college differs greatly and is shaped by internal and external factors in their environment, including campus participation, college self-efficacy, depression and stress. Prior research indicates the impact of family on how a student expresses each of these variables (Schmidtgall, King, Zarski & Cooper, 2000; Bradbury & Mather, 2009; Hannum & Dvorak, 2004; Kenny & Donaldson, 1991; Lopez et al, 2001; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2006). …

There Is No 'Obstetrical Dilemma': Towards A Braver Medicine With Fewer Childbirth Interventions, Holly M. Dunsworth

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Humans give birth to big-brained babies through a bony birth canal that metamorphosed during the evolution of bipedalism; they have a tighter fit at birth between baby and bony birth canal than do our closest relatives the chimpanzees; and they are incapable of grasping onto caregivers as early as infant chimpanzees develop the skill. Since the mid-20th century, these observations and more have been linked together into the "obstetrical dilemma" (OD): human babies are helpless because they are born early to escape before they outgrow the mother's pelvis, the expansion of which is prevented by natural selection for bipedalism. The …

Community And Landscape Patterns Of Forb Pannes: On Two Maine Salt Marshes, Briana Fischella

Student Scholarship

Mixed forb pannes of Maine are maintained by waterlogging and are replaced by turf-grass species when drained, elevated, or warmed. These drivers, in particular waterlogging and temperature rise, counteract each other and are representative of in-field abiotic influences such as sea level rise (SLR) and climate warming. Researchers in Maine have studied forb panne landscape distribution, plant communities, and nutrients on salt marshes; however, no one has addressed how forb pannes change over time or mechanisms for this change. My objectives were to 1) remap and statistically compare spatial characteristics and changes undergone in mixed forb pannes of the Little …

Fishway Assessment And Cost Analysis Report, Royal River, Yarmouth, Me, Inter-Fluve

Publications

This study provides a detailed assessment of the fish passage potential at the Bridge Street and East Elm Street dams on the Royal River in the town of Yarmouth, Maine. The study also identifies four alternative approaches to enhance fish passage at each dam, and summarizes analyses to compare the relative costs of the identified alternatives at each site. The target native fish community identified for the study included alewife, American eel, American shad, blueback herring, sea‐run brook trout, rainbow smelt, sea lamprey, and striped bass.

These Aren’T The Loci You’Re Looking For: Principles Of Effective Snp Filtering For Molecular Ecologists, Shannon J. O'Leary, Jonathan B. Puritz, Stuar C. Willis, Christopher M. Hollenbeck, David S. Portnoy

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Sequencing reduced‐representation libraries of restriction site‐associated DNA (RADseq) to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) is quickly becoming a standard methodology for molecular ecologists. Because of the scale of RADseq data sets, putative loci cannot be assessed individually, making the process of filtering noise and correctly identifying biologically meaningful signal more difficult. Artefacts introduced during library preparation and/or bioinformatic processing of SNP data can create patterns that are incorrectly interpreted as indicative of population structure or natural selection. Therefore, it is crucial to carefully consider types of errors that may be introduced during laboratory work and data processing, and how to …

Predator-Driven Natural Selection On Risk-Taking Behavior In Anole Lizards, Oriol Lapiedra, Thomas W. Schoener, Manuel Leal, Jonathan B. Losos, Jason J. Kolbe

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Biologists have long debated the role of behavior in evolution, yet understanding of its role as a driver of adaptation is hampered by the scarcity of experimental studies of natural selection on behavior in nature. After showing that individual Anolis sagrei lizards vary consistently in risk-taking behaviors, we experimentally established populations on eight small islands either with or without Leiocephalus carinatus, a major ground predator. We found that selection predictably favors different risk-taking behaviors under different treatments: Exploratory behavior is favored in the absence of predators, whereas avoidance of the ground is favored in their presence. On predator islands, …

Expressed Exome Capture Sequencing (Eecseq): A Method For Cost-Effective Exome Sequencing For All Organisms, Jonathan B. Puritz, Katie E. Lotterhos

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Exome capture is an effective tool for surveying the genome for loci under selection. However, traditional methods require annotated genomic resources. Here, we present a method for creating cDNA probes from expressed mRNA, which are then used to enrich and capture genomic DNA for exon regions. This approach, called “EecSeq,” eliminates the need for costly probe design and synthesis. We tested EecSeq in the eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica, using a controlled exposure experiment. Four adult oysters were heat shocked at 36°C for 1 hr along with four control oysters kept at 14°C. Stranded mRNA libraries were prepared for two …

College Of Pharmacy Annual Report For Fy2018, Uri College Of Pharmacy

College of Pharmacy Reports

Annual report for the College of Pharmacy of the University of Rhode Island for the year 2017-2018.

Includes information and statistics for the academic programs, research work and developments by faculty and students, community engagement and donations.

Virginia Commonwealth University Graduate Bulletin [2018], Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU Bulletins

Graduate bulletin for Virginia Commonwealth University for the academic year 2018-2019. It includes information on academic regulations, degree requirements, course offerings, faculty, academic calendar, and tuition and expenses for graduate programs.

Aboard Gso: A Newsletter For Alumni And Friends Of The University Of Rhode Island’S Graduate School Of Oceanography For Winter 2018, Uri Graduate School Of Oceanography

Graduate School of Oceanography Publications

The Winter 2018 issue of Aboard GSO: A Newsletter for Alumni and Friends of the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, a periodical about GSO events, faculty research and essays by alumni.

K-Means And Hierarchical Cluster Analysis As Segmentation Algorithms Of Ftir Hyperspectral Images Collected From Cutaneous Tissue, Cassio Lima, Luciana Correa, Hugh Byrne, Denise Zezell

Articles

Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is a rapid and label-free analytical technique whose potential as a diagnostic tool has been well demonstrated. The combination of spectroscopy and microscopy technologies enable wide-field scanning of a sample, providing a hyperspectral image with tens of thousands of spectra in a few minutes. In order to increase the information content of FTIR images, different clustering algorithms have been proposed as segmentation methods. However, systematic comparative tests of these techniques are still missing. Thus, the present paper aims to compare the ability of K-means Cluster Analysis (KMCA) and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) as clustering algorithms …

Dna Base Sequence Effects On Bulky Lesion-Induced Conformational Heterogeneity During Dna Replication, Ang Cai, Katie A. Wilson, Satyakam Patnaik, Stacey D. Wetmore, Bongsup P. Cho

Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences Faculty Publications

4-Aminobiphenyl (ABP) and its structure analog 2-aminofluorene (AF) are well-known carcinogens. In the present work, an unusual sequence effect in the 5′-CTTCTG₁G₂TCCTCATTC-3′ DNA duplex is reported for ABP- and AF-modified G. Specifically, the ABP modification at G₁ resulted in a mixture of 67% major groove B-type (B) and 33% stacked (S) conformers, while at the ABP modification at G₂ exclusively resulted in the B-conformer. The AF modification at G₁ and G₂ lead to 25%:75% and 83%:17% B:S population ratios, respectively. These differences in preferred conformation are due to an interplay between stabilizing …