Digital Commons Network^™

The Creation Of Military Family Leisure Experiences, Karen K. Melton, Jasmine Townsend, Camilla J. Hodge

Faculty Publications

This article provides a theoretical model that positions family leisure experiences as a mechanism for positive family outcomes and resilience in military families. The article integrates the Creation of Family Experiences (CFE) framework with literature on military families, family leisure, and structured experiences. The CFE framework is a conceptual model that provides a lens for examining the context of family activities in order to better identify benefits for human development and family relations. When contextualized within military settings, the CFE can be used to understand and systematically optimize military family leisure experiences. It is critical to consider the experiences of …

A Systematic Review Of Non-Pharmacological Interventions To Improve Nighttime Sleep Among Residents Of Long-Term Care Settings, Elizabeth Capezuti, Rana Sagha Zadeh, Kevin Pain, Aleksa Basara, Nancy Ziyan Jiang, Ana C. Krieger

Publications and Research

Background: Disturbances in sleep and circadian rhythms are common among residents of long-term care facilities. In this systematic review, we aim to identify and evaluate the literature documenting the outcomes associated with non-pharmacological interventions to improve nighttime sleep among long-term care residents.

Methods: The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews guided searches of five databases (MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Scopus, and Cochrane Library) for articles reporting results of experimental or quasi-experimental studies conducted in long-term care settings (nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, or group homes) in which nighttime sleep was subjectively or objectively measured as a primary outcome. We categorized each intervention …

Galliformes Taxon Advisory Group: Aza Regional Collection Plan, Third Edition, 2018-2023, Association Of Zoos And Aquariums

Galliformes Specialist Group and Affiliated Societies: Reports and Other Materials

Galliformes Taxon Advisory Group: AZA Regional Collection Plan, Third Edition, 2018-2023 / Association of Zoos and Aquariums

TAG mission statement

TAG vision statement

Leadership and TAG structure

TAG History and Introduction

TAG goals, 2018-2023

Rearing-lifelong welfare

Private sector-TAG relations

TAG definition

Taxonomy

Conservation

Conservation status table of all Galliformes

Species selection criteria

Species selection decision tree

Recommended species summary

Space assessment

Animal program summary table

Replacement tables

Family: Megapodiidae (brush-turkey, megapode, scrubfowl)

Maleo Macrocephalon maleo

Non-recommended species justification and suggested replacement species

Family: Cracidae (chachalacas, guans, and curassows)

Horned guan Oreophasis derbianus

Blue-billed curassow Crax alberti

Wattled curassow Crax globulosa …

Malleable Rationality, Stephanie Plamondon

Faculty Scholarship

In 1998, Christine Jolls, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler published A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics, one of the most important pieces of scholarship in decades. Their article famously proposes a departure from the neoclassical law and economics approach to legal analysis. Breaking from neoclassical law and economics’ rational actor construct, the authors apply empirical insights about human behavior to introduce the concept of a boundedly rational actor limited by cognitive constraints. Over the past two decades, the behavioral law and economics approach, with its focus on the boundedly rational actor, has contributed needed realism to legal analyses. Unfortunately, …

Piece Of Cake, Brett Scharffs, Frank S. Ravitch

Faculty Scholarship

A baker refuses to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because of his religious views on same-sex marriage. The couple claims the baker’s refusal violates state anti-discrimination laws. Their case, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, now awaits a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, which must wrestle with complicated questions about conflicting rights. We posed some of those questions to two religious liberty scholars: Frank S. Ravitch, Professor of Law and Walter H. Stowers Chair in Law and Religion at Michigan State University College of Law, and Brett G. Scharffs, Rex E. Lee Chair and …

Perceptions Of Obese African American Women Regarding Altering Traditional Soul Food Preparation, Patricia Young

Journal of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

The obesity epidemic continues to be a major concern in the United States. The World Health Organization reported that 1.4 billion adults were either obese or overweight African American (AA) women have the highest incidence of obesity worldwide. A qualitative descriptive study was used to explore the perceptions of obese AA women about altering how they prepare soul food to make it healthier. The empowerment model and the health belief model were used to frame this study. Data were collected using a nonprobability purposeful sampling strategy. The sample for this study consisted of four focus groups with six to seven …

Widening The Sphere: Mid-To-Late Victorian Popular Fiction, Gender Representation, And Canonicity, Anna J. Brecke

Open Access Dissertations

When Victorian fiction entered academic study in the mid-twentieth century, the texts that were considered essential had been influenced by a small group of scholars primarily concerned with studying the novel form across periods rather than studying literature of the Victorian Era. The collection of authors that became "the" Victorian canon included Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, the Brontës, Trollope, Henry James and George Eliot, limiting the Victorian novel to realist fiction. The choices of these critics did not accurately represent the diverse range of authors and genres in fiction published during the period. Particularly absent from this canon are the popular …

In Vitro Drug Metabolism And Population Pharmacokinetics As Tools For Elucidating Pharmacokinetic Variability, Enoch Cobbina

Open Access Dissertations

Pharmacokinetic variability is an important consideration in pharmacotherapy to ensure safety and efficacy of medications, thus the understanding of the sources of variability in drug concentrations in the body is imperative. The goals of this dissertation were: (1) To use in vitro drug metabolism tools to characterize the influence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) on Cytochrome P450 2B6 (CYP2B6)-mediated hydroxylation of bupropion in human liver microsomes; and (2) To use population pharmacokinetics to characterize the pharmacokinetics of PF-5190457, an inverse agonist of the growth hormone secretagogue receptor (hGHSR1a). This work has been organized in two parts. Part one is …

Use Of Radiation To Kill Cancer By Nanoparticles And In A Biodosimeter Using Gene Expression Analysis, Samana Shrestha

Open Access Dissertations

The use of radiation is broad in biological systems, in different areas of research mostly in health.

Radiation is used to kill cancer. In radiation therapy proper calculation is done so that a maximum dose is delivered to the cancer. Inspite of this precaution, radiation effects healthy tissue. This effect is especially dangerous when the tumor is located near important organs. Thus in radiation therapy, it is important to reduce the dose and the damage to the healthy tissues and organs. The damage on the healthy tissues due to radiation therapy in cancer could be reduced by reducing the radiation …

Impacts Of Urbanization And Invasive Species On Foraging Behavior And Body Size In Anolis Sagrei, Zachary Chejanovski

Open Access Dissertations

Urbanization dramatically alters the abiotic and biotic environment of cities, favoring species that are pre-adapted or are able to adapt (e.g. through phenotypic plasticity or evolutionary mechanisms) to these novel conditions. While urbanization is widely considered one of the greatest threats to biodiversity worldwide, we still lack a general understanding of the mechanisms underlying organismal responses to human-induced rapid environmental change. The focus of this thesis was to examine how urbanization-induced changes in the abiotic and biotic environment influence the foraging behavior and body size of the brown anole, Anolis sagrei. In Chapter 1, we presented anoles from habitats …

Regulation Of Ubiquitin Specific Peptidase 2 Expression By Farnesoid X Receptor In Hepatocellular Carcinoma, Christina Nadolny

Open Access Dissertations

Liver cancer is in the ten leading cancer types for estimated new cases and deaths in the United States in 2018, and is often detected at late stages when it is rapidly fatal. Of the types of liver cancers in humans, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most lethal and prevalent. An important factor in the development of HCC is Farnesoid X Receptor (FXR). FXR acts as master regulator of bile acid homeostasis, and is involved in lipid, cholesterol, and glucose homeostasis. In addition, it plays a protective role against HCC, the precise mechanisms of which has yet to be identified. …

Characterizing The Functional Role And Regulated Assembly Of Protein Polymers Mind And Ftsa During Escherichia Coli Cell Division, Joseph Jake Conti

Open Access Dissertations

It is an immense undertaking for any organism, including a bacterium, to self-replicate. Accurate and rapid division is essential for bacteria to proliferate and produce progeny, especially in environments where there is competition for resources. The nucleoid, the region of the cell that contains the DNA, harbors the genetic information required to achieve robust division, but it is the assembly of the cell division machinery, collectively referred to as the divisome, that produces and coordinates the mechanical force necessary to divide a cell. The hallmark of prokaryotic cell division is the formation of a protein super-structure, called the Z-ring, which …

Conformations, Energetics, And Kinetics Of Peptides In Membrane Environment, Ganga P. Sharma

Open Access Dissertations

Chapter 1: We present the exact solution of a microscopic statistical mechanical model for the transformation of a long polypeptide between an unstructured coil conformation and an α-helix conformation. The polypeptide is assumed to be adsorbed to the interface between a polar and a non-polar environment such as realized by water and the lipid bilayer of a membrane. The interfacial coil-helix transformation is the first stage in the folding process of helical membrane proteins. Depending on the values of model parameters, the conformation changes as a crossover, a discontinuous transition, or a continuous transition with helicity in the role of …

Monitoring Salt Marsh Condition And Change With Satellite Remote Sensing, Anthony Daniel Campbell

Open Access Dissertations

Salt marshes are a frontline of climate change providing a bulwark against sea level rise, an interface between aquatic and terrestrial habitat, important nursery grounds for many species, a buffer against extreme storm impacts, and vast blue carbon repositories. Since the 1700s salt marshes have been in flux due to anthropogenic actions, such as reclamation for development causing loss and an influx of sediment from land clearing leading to marsh expansion. The Clean Water Act of 1972 provides legal protections for wetlands, limiting wetland reclamation and requiring that impacts be offset. However, salt marshes continue to change rapidly due to …

High Resolution Data Acquisition System For Brain Imaging, Seyed Hadi Nasrollaholhosseini

Open Access Dissertations

The U.S. has 12.3% disabled people based on the American Community Survey (ACS) in 2012. According to this survey, more than half of the disabled population suffers from ambulatory disabilities. Therefore, a system which enables people with disabilities to control their environments is crucially important. Moreover, ubiquitous physiological monitoring will be a key driving force in the upcoming medical revolution. Cardiac and brain signals in the form of electrocardiograms (ECGs) and electroencephalograms (EEGs) are two critical health indicators that directly benefit from long-term monitoring.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are systems that detect changes in brain signals related to human intentions, typically …

Brain-Body Sensory Fusion: Merging Fnirs/Eeg Neuroimaging And Full-Body Motion Capture, Mohammadreza Abtahi

Open Access Dissertations

Functional connectivity between the brain and body kinematics has not been largely investigated due to the requirement of being motionless in neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The importance of investigating this connectivity arises from the fact that the connectivity is disrupted in many neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD). PD is a neurological progressive disorder characterized by movement symptoms including slowness of movement, stiffness, tremors at rest, and walking and standing instability.

Body kinematics are generally divided into two categories of fine and gross motor tasks. Fine motor movements are referred to small range kinematics …

Benthic Habitat Mapping And Its Applications To Coastal Resource Management, Monique Lafrance Bartley

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters focused on benthic habitat mapping of coastal waters within northeast region of the United States to support science-based regulatory and management strategies. The first chapter is entitled: Shallow water benthic habitat mapping utilizing the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) to establish baseline conditions post-Hurricane Sandy at Fire Island National Seashore, New York. In response to Hurricane Sandy, a benthic habitat mapping study was conducted at Fire Island National Seashore (FIIS), New York, representing one of the first comprehensive mapping efforts undertaken by the National Park Service. FIIS was of particular interest …

After “Being Thrown In The Classroom”: The Development Of Pedagogical Skills In Veteran Adjunct Faculty Teaching In The Natural Sciences, Heather Shannon Miceli

Open Access Dissertations

The postsecondary landscape has changed drastically in the past 40 years, with one of the most obvious changes being the increased reliance on adjunct or part-time faculty. Approximately 50% of the current faculty employed by postsecondary institutions are categorized as part-time faculty, up from approximately 25% in 1975 (American Association of University Professors, 2017; Snyder, de Bray, & Dillow, 2016). While there is literature surrounding the impacts of this phenomenon, the majority of studies are entrenched in a positivist framework, utilize quantitative methods, and many use large datasets to distill down whether students are more or less successful when taught …

Experimental And Numerical Simulations For Fluid Body Interaction Problems, Amin Mivehchi

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the experimental and numerical modelling of fluid structure interaction (FSI) problems. The main objective of this work was to develop state-of-art experimental and numerical tools to investigate a variety of Fluid-Structure Interaction problems. This topic is of critical importance to Naval Hydrodynamics and offshore applications, such as in ship design, floating offshore wind platforms and offshore ocean energy systems.

On the experimental modelling of FSI, this dissertation includes detailed of state-of-art hydrodynamic testing tank system for studying biomimetic fluid-structure interaction problems. This system was employed to study unsteady ground effect for pitching and heaving flapping foil …

A Comparison Of The Antimicrobial Efficacy Of Silver Diamine Fluoride And Silver Nitrate: An Ex Vivo Study, Reham M. Alnajjar

Theses and Dissertations

A comparison of the antimicrobial efficacy of silver diamine fluoride and silver nitrate on various cariogenic bacteria: an ex vivo study By: Reham AlNajjar, D.D.S.

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Dentistry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2019

Thesis Advisor: William Dahlke, D.M.D., Associate Professor and Chair of Pediatric Dentistry, School of Dentistry

Purpose: The use of silver-based antimicrobials is an emerging method for the treatment of dental caries. In this study, the authors compare the efficacy of the two most prominent silver- based therapeutics, silver diamine …

That Was Close! Reward Reporting Of Cybersecurity “Near Misses”, Jonathan Bair, Steven M. Bellovin, Andrew Manley, Blake Reid, Adam Shostak

Publications

Building, deploying, and maintaining systems with sufficient cybersecurity is challenging. Faster improvement would be valuable to society as a whole. Are we doing as much as we can to improve? We examine robust and long-standing systems for learning from near misses in aviation, and propose the creation of a Cyber Safety Reporting System (CSRS).

To support this argument, we examine the liability concerns which inhibit learning, including both civil and regulatory liability. We look to the way in which cybersecurity engineering and science is done today, and propose that a small amount of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ could have substantial positive impact. …

Sanctuary Networks And Integrative Enforcement, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

My intended focus is on the widespread response--in cities, churches, campuses, and corporations that together comprise "sanctuary networks"--to the Trump Administration's Executive Order 13768 Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States as an instance of the changing relationship between federal, local, and private organizations in the regulation of immigration. After briefly covering the legal background of the Trump Interior E.O., the focus of the Article shifts to the institutional dynamics arising in communities. These institutional dynamics exemplify the beginnings of a reimagined immigration enforcement policy with a more integrative flavor.

Evaluating The Legality Of Age-Based Criteria In Health Care: From Nondiscrimination And Discretion To Distributive Justice, Govind Persad

Publications

Recent disputes over whether older people should pay more for health insurance, or receive lower priority for transplantable organs, highlight broader disagreements regarding the legality of using age-based criteria in health care. These debates will likely intensify given the changing age structure of the American population and the turmoil surrounding the financing of American health care. This Article provides a comprehensive examination of the legality and normative desirability of age-based criteria. In the Article, I defend a distributive justice approach to age-based criteria. Rather than viewing age as a personal characteristic akin to race or religion, the distributive justice approach …

Paying Patients: Legal And Ethical Dimensions, Govind Persad

Publications

This Article explores the implications for medical care of a debate that is more familiar in the law and ethics of human subjects research: whether people should be paid to receive or decline medical interventions, or to reach certain health objectives. It examines the legal and ethical issues such payments raise, and considers various actors who might make such payments, including governments, employers, insurers, care providers, and private parties. It argues for two interrelated conclusions: first, that these payments should not be subject to blanket normative condemnation, and, second, that payments made in different settings and contexts frequently share underlying …

An Ambitious Approach, Nicole Buonocore Porter

Faculty Publications

In their book, Lifetime Disadvantage, Discrimination and the Gendered Workforce, Susan Bisom-Rapp and Malcolm Sargeant explore the disadvantages women experience in the workforce throughout their careers and the cumulative effects of those disadvantages over their lifetimes.

[...]

Part II of this review is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book. Part III provides my critical evaluation of the both the goals of this book and its execution. Part IV uses this book's ambitious approach as a springboard for exploring one of my own research projects that has been simply gathering dust.

This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.

Developing Deaf Students Fraction Skills Requires Understanding Magnitude And Whole Number Division, Keith Mousley, Ronald R. Kelly

Articles

Research has shown that fraction magnitude and whole number division are important precursors to learning and understanding fractions. Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students are consistently challenged with learning fractions from K-12 through college. Sixty DHH college students were tested for both their understanding of magnitude between two fractions and their ability to calculate whole number division. The results showed that both understanding the magnitude between two fractions and whole number division are significantly associated with accurately calculating arithmetic functions of fractions with like denominators and different denominators that required them to add, subtract, multiply, and divide two fractions. Understanding fraction …

Measurements Of Radiation Pressure Owing To The Grating Momentum, Ying-Ju Lucy Chu, Eric M. Jansson, Grover A. Swartzlander

Articles

The radiation pressure force on a nearly single-order diffraction grating was measured for a transmission grating near the Littrow angles at wavelengths of 808 and 447 nm. The component of force parallel to the grating agreed well with our prediction, being proportional to the product of the grating order and the ratio of the wavelength and grating period. The normal component of force varied with the incident angle, vanishing near the Littrow angle as expected. The measurements verify a correspondence between the Fourier grating momentum and the mechanical momentum. This Letter provides opportunities for in-space fly-by-light sailcraft as well as …

An Investigation On Characteristics Of Tracking Failure In Epoxy Resin Withharmonic And Fractal Dimension Analysis, Mehmet Murat İspi̇rli̇, Aysel Ersoy Yilmaz

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Epoxy resins have excellent mechanical and electrical properties; thus, they are commonly preferred in the electrical{electronic sector as insulation materials. These insulation materials experience degradation such as breakdown, tracking, or treeing. Therefore, safety and reliability tests of insulation materials have great importance in estimating the performance of insulation. These tests must be carried out to decrease the risk of electrical insulation fault. In this study, the relationship between tracking failures and the data obtained during experiments was evaluated. Tracking failure performance of epoxy resin was investigated using the IEC 60112 test standard, which is known as the comparative tracking index …

Highly Accurate And Sensitive Short Read Aligner, Mehmet Yağmur Gök, Sezer Gören Uğurdağ, Cem Ünsalan, Mahmut Şami̇l Sağiroğlu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Next-generation sequencing generates large numbers of short reads from DNA. This makes it difficult to process and store. Therefore, efficient sequence alignment and mapping techniques are needed in bioinformatics. Alignment and mapping are the basic steps involved in genetic data analysis. The Smith-Waterman (SW) algorithm, a well-known dynamic programming algorithm, is often used for this purpose. In this work, we propose to utilize Phred quality scores in Gotoh's affine gap model to increase the accuracy and sensitivity of the SW algorithm. Hardware platforms such as FPGAs and GPUs are commonly used to solve computationally expensive problems. In this work, a …

Classification Of Surface Electromyogram Signals Based On Directed Acyclic Graphs And Support Vector Machines, Xinhui Hu, Jiangming Kan, Wenbin Li

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper presents a novel classification approach for surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals. The proposed classification approach involves two steps: (1) feature extraction from an sEMG, in which a 7-dimensional feature vector is extracted from 27 types of features of the sEMG by linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and (2) a novel classifier, DAGSVMerr, based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and support vector machine (SVM), in which a separability measure function based on erroneous recognition rates (ERRs) is defined to determine the initial operation list. The proposed approach takes advantage of the feedback idea to improve the performance of the classification. …