Digital Commons Network^™

Meat Reimagined: The Ethics Of Cultured Meat, Valan Anthos

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In this paper I explore a relatively new technology that is being developed to try and solve some of the major issues with modern animal agriculture called cultured meat. I cover the short history of this technology and where it is at currently before addressing two different ways of evaluating the ethics of cultured meat. Responding to much of the praise for cultured meat based on consequentialist ethics, I lay out reasons for skepticism and how some of these estimates might be overblown due to those people advocating for it being situated in the ideology of ecomodernism. I argue that …

Avian Community Responses To Bison Grazing In North American Intermountain Grasslands, Danielle A. Fagre

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Grassland and shrubland songbird species are a guild of conservation concern in North America. Many of these species have experienced severe population declines, due to habitat loss and land use change. This makes the conservation and management of remaining habitat of crucial importance for this guild. Grazing by large herbivores is an ecosystem process in grassland systems, and in North America, one of the major historic grazers was the Plains bison (Bison bison). Bison are considered ecosystem engineers, because they modify habitat to be more or less suitable for other species, such as grassland and shrubland songbirds. Bison …

Mediating Cultural Border Crossings Between American Indian Tribal College Students And Natural Resources Science Learning Using Culturally Congruent Education, Shandin Hashkeh Pete

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study is motivated by two research questions: (1) How does Culturally Congruent Instruction (CCI) influence American Indian (AI) students' attitudes and achievement in natural resources science at a tribally controlled college/university (TCU)? And (2) What is the nature of the relationship between CCI course modifications and changes (or lack of) in AI students' science attitudes and achievement at a TCU? Findings developed a Culturally Congruent Instructional Framework (CCIF) for use in TCUs and beyond.

Previous research suggest that AI students and tribal college science must find congruence for the student to cross cultural boundaries of the institution. TCUs can …

Using Astrobiology As A Platform To Study The Impact On The Mathematical Content Knowledge And Pedagogical Content Knowledge Of Elementary Education Majors, Meredith Kay Berthelson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Early mathematical skills have long been hailed as a cornerstone and as the best predictor of later success in mathematics and literacy. This perception highlights the importance of elementary educator’s mathematical content knowledge (MCK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). This study explored a novel approach to motivating and facilitating preservice elementary educators’ engagement in an interdisciplinary context. Astrobiology is a growing interdisciplinary field with extraordinary educational potential. It has the potential to provide an exciting science framework structure to mathematics for preservice educators. Due to its interdisciplinary content, astrobiology offers preservice educators an opportunity to see math content through a …

Intelligent Personal Assistants In The Classroom: Impact On Student Engagement, Jason Patrick Neiffer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Intelligent personal assists are as a software tool utilized by millions of consumers to interact with their smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, or smart speaker. As more mobile and computer operating systems offer the feature, more classrooms and ultimately students will have access to one of these tools, either on a school-purchased device or a personal device.

The aim of this study was to look at a specific implementation of Siri, an intelligent personal assistant platform, in upper elementary and middle school science classrooms. The researcher utilized the lense of student engagement to measure the impact of the implementation …

Universal Design For Learning In Online Credit Recovery: Do Course Features Impact Achievement?, Robert I. Squires

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This experimental study investigated whether the addition of course features based on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework impacted achievement in an online English 1A credit recovery course offered by a state virtual school in the Western United States. An alternative format for completing course mastery assignments and eText support tools (ReadSpeaker and TextAid) were added to an existing version of the course. Writing prompts were also included in the alternative mastery assignments. Credit recovery students were randomly enrolled by school personnel into control and treatment sections of the English 1A courses using the enrollment mechanism of the school’s …

Determination Of Lipid Bilayer Affinities For Small Molecules Using Capillary Electrophoresis And Copolymer – Stabilized Lipid Bilayer Nanodiscs, William Michael Penny

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Electrokinetic chromatography is a variation of capillary electrophoresis that allows for the separation of nonionic analytes by selective interaction with an ionic pseudostationary phase dissolved in the background electrolyte. The utility of electrokinetic chromatography to characterize pseudostationary phases and pseudostationary phase–solute interactions has been recognized since its introduction. The objective of this dissertation was to use electrokinetic chromatography and copolymer stabilized lipid bilayer nanodiscs as a pseudostationary phase to characterize small molecule-lipid bilayer interactions.

Styrene-maleic acid copolymers were used to stabilize cylindrical sections of lipid bilayer in solution, forming nanodiscs. The nanodiscs are formed based on strong hydrophobic interactions between …

Greening Of The Arctic: Plot-Scale Analysis Of Interactions Between Climate, Vegetation, And Permafrost At Toolik Lake, Alaska (1995 - 2017), Brianna Rick

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Air temperatures across the Arctic have increased in recent decades, and through complex feedbacks, vegetation and permafrost (frozen ground) are actively responding as climate warming continues. This study investigates the trends and interactions of observed air, soil-surface temperature (SST), and active-layer thickness (ALT) at Toolik Lake on the Alaskan North Slope between 1995 and 2017, as well as vegetation change over time.

Time series between 1995 and 2017 at CALM site U12B, a 1 ha plot near Toolik Lake, reveal an increase (0.50 °C/decade) in mean summer (Jun-Aug) air temperatures and a decrease (­0.23 °C/decade) in mean summer SST. In …

Directional Non-Covalent Interactions: Exploring The Nuances Of Halogen Bonds And Hydrogen Bonds In Solution And The Solid-State, Nicholas Blouin Wageling

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Molecules interact in numerous ways. Halogen bonding is one of the most newly discovered and poorly understood non-covalent interactions. However, this attractive force may be a useful tool for chemists in various disciplines. The directional nature, and competitive strength of the interaction makes it a promising alternative to hydrogen bonding based molecules. Indeed, through crystal structures and solution phase anion titrations, this work has shown that a halogen bonding scaffold can outperform its hydrogen bonding analogue not only in overall interaction strength, but also in resistance to inactivation from polar solvents (an important feature in anion receptors, organocatalysts, and many …

The Development Of A Simplified Alkalinity Titration Analyzer, Reba Van Beusekom

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Alkalinity is the acid neutralizing capacity for water, meaning alkalinity measures how sensitive an aquatic system is to acidic inputs. Currently, there are various measuring systems for alkalinity available including chemical test kits, potentiometric techniques, and colorimetric methods. Commercially available products lack the ease of use combined with precision and accuracy desired for on-line process and environmental monitoring. The goal of this project is to develop a simplified alkalinity titration analyzer, called the easyTMT, to measure alkalinity with precision and accuracy comparable to the best conventional methods. The system, under development, uses the Tracer Monitored Titration (TMT) technique. TMT …

Quantum Mechanics Investigation Of The Photophysical Properties Of Ruthenium(Ii)-Based Complexes Combined With The Development Of Their Force Field Parameters Using Molecular Mechanics And Molecular Dynamics Simulation, Sanaa Saad Alabbad

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The focus of this study is to develop a theoretical strategy that can help guide the design of novel organometallics with desirable photophysical properties for molecular engineering. This computational study includes proposed complexes and others for which experimental data are available. The agreement between the computational results and the experimental observations confirms the validity of our procedure and the level of theory we applied in this study. The ground singlet (S0) and excited triplet (T1) electronic states and corresponding optical spectra of a series of cationic complexes —[RuH(CO)L(PPh3)2]+ (L=2,2´-bipyridyl) (Rubpy), 4,4´-dicarboxylic-2,2´-bipyridyl (Rudcbpy), bis-4,4’-(N-methylamide)-2,2´-bipyridyl (Rudamidebpy), bis-4,4’-(methyl)-2,2´-bipyridyl (RudMebpy), [Ru(CO)2dcbpy(PPh3)2]2+ (Ru(2CO)dcbpy), [Ru(H)2dcbpy(PPh3)2] (Ru(2H)dcbpy), …

Transfer Of Graphing Skills From Math To Chemistry, Brittany Danielle Busby

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Most students begin their university studies with adequate mathematical skills to succeed in general chemistry. However, students have a demonstrated difficulty with the application of math in a chemistry context. The ability to apply skills to new contexts is known as transfer, and understanding and enhancing transfer of graphing skills into the context of chemistry is the primary purpose of this investigation. Graphing skills were selected as the area of emphasis because they provide a strong conceptual link between math and chemistry.

This is a two-phase, sequential, quasi-experimental, mixed-methods study. In the first phase of the study, the quantitative research …

Curated Chaos: A Rhetorical Study Of Axmen, Rebekah A. Mcdonald

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In this study, the author uses mixed methods to analyze a three-dimensional place as a rhetorical artifact. The artifact, Axmen, is a family owned, for-profit retail store and a non-profit museum outside of Missoula, Montana. Using examples of the tangible and semiotic features found within the place, the author demonstrates and translates the rhetorical messages communicated there. These messages are then contrasted with the messages the owners and curators of Axmen want to communicate. The author argues that the current curation of museum artifacts and retail products is exclusive to white males, romanticizing blue collar work. This single-lens narrative of …

Quantifying Effects Of Using Thermally Thin Fuel Approximations On Modelling Fire Propagation In Woody Fuels, David Blasen, Jesse Johnson, William Jolly, Russell Parsons

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In this paper, we quantify the effects of the thermally thin fuel approximations commonly made in numerical models that eliminate temperature gradients within a heated object. This assumption is known to affect the modeled ignition and burn behavior, but there is little research on its impact, particularly in larger fuels or in numerical models including moisture and chemical decomposition of fuels.

We begin by comparing modeled to observed ignition times and burn rates. To constrain variability in the material properties of wood and focus on variability caused by fuels assumed to be thermally thin, we conduct experiments using thermogravimetric analysis …

Of Ruptures And Raptures: Locating Ideology With Lidar Imagery, William Dale Schroeder

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Archaeological praxis necessarily requires at least one object (a piece of technology or something that functions as an object) to articulate and explain ideologies from the past. This is problematic because ideology is abstract and difficult to locate in the archaeological record in reified form. Archaeology’s preoccupation for over 100 years has been the systematic location, identification, and excavation of discrete artifacts; features, and sites; interpreting meanings from comparative studies and data sets; and putting the past in order all while documenting change over time. Historical archaeologist Mark P. Leone identified fences, the Plat of the ideal City of Zion, …

Just Open A Window: Understanding The Vulnerability To Summer Heat Of A Mountain Community In The Western United States, Missoula, Mt, Julie J. Tompkins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

How do we conceptualize vulnerability or resiliency to a natural hazard when it has not historically been understood as such? This study focuses on Missoula, located in mountains of western Montana, which has steadily grown by 1-2% per year to almost 75,000 residents. The formerly temperate quality of its winters and summers has also been changing. Projections from the 2017 Montana Climate Assessment estimate the state will experience a 2-5°F increase in mean annual air temperature over the next two decades, prompting city and county officials to plan for scenarios not formerly in their consideration. Of further concern is the …

Leaving More Than Footprints: Impacts Of Tourism And Perceptions Of Change In Chilean Patagonia, Heidi Blair

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Visitation to protected areas is on the rise globally, and the Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia is part of that trend. Within Aysén, Cerro Castillo National Reserve is one of the protected areas that has seen the largest increase in visitation in recent years. Protected area tourism catalyzes changes in surrounding communities, and it is important to understand resident perceptions of these changes in order to inform management planning and to implement effective, equitable conservation policy. In this study, I use qualitative research methods to investigate local residents’ perceptions of social, economic, and ecological changes spurred by or related to …

Patents, Property, And Prospectivity, Jonathan Masur, Adam Mortara

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

When judges change the legal rules governing patents, those changes are always retroactive. That is, they apply equally to patents that have already been granted and patents that do not yet exist. There are benefits to making a change in the law retroactive, particularly if the new legal rule is an improvement over what preceded it. But there are costs as well. Retroactive changes in the law upset reliance interests. This can be particularly harmful when those reliance interests involve rights or entitlements that form the basis for substantial financial investment, as is often the case with patents. What is …

Legality In Contemporary Chinese Politics, Taisu Zhang, Tom Ginsburg

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The picture of Chinese law that many Western scholars and commentators portray is an increasingly bleak one: since the mid-2000s, China has been retreating from legal reform back into unchecked authoritarianism. This article argues that, much to the contrary, Chinese politics have in fact become substantially more law-oriented over the past five years. The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has indeed centralized power and control to an almost unprecedented extent, but it has done this in a highly legalistic way, empowering courts against other state and Party entities, insisting on legal professionalism, and bringing political powers that were formerly …

Article Ii And Antidiscrimination Norms, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The Supreme Court’s judgment in Trump v. Hawai’i validated a prohibition on entry to the United States from several largely Muslim-majority countries, and at the same time repudiated a longstanding precedent associated with the Japanese-American internment of World War II. This Article closely analyzes the relationship of these twin holdings. It uses their dichotomous valances as a lens onto the legal scope for discriminatory action by the federal executive. Parsing the various ways in which the internment of the 1940s and the 2017 exclusion order can be reconciled, the Article identifies a generative tension between the two holdings. Contrary to …

The Supreme Court Of India: An Empirical Overview Of The Institution, Aparna Chandra, William H.J. Hubbard, Sital Kalantry

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The Indian Supreme Court has been called “the most powerful court in the world” for its wide jurisdiction, its expansive understanding of its own powers, and the billion plus people under its authority. Yet scholars and policy makers have a very uneven picture of the court’s functioning: deep knowledge about the more visible, “high-profile” cases but very little about more mundane, but far more numerous and potentially equally important, decisions. This chapter aims to address this imbalance with a rigorous, empirical account of the Court’s decisions from 2010 to 2015. We use the most extensive original dataset of Indian Supreme …

Racial Equity In Algorithmic Criminal Justice, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Algorithmic tools for predicting violence and criminality are being used more and more in policing, bail, and sentencing. Scholarly attention to date has focused on their procedural due process implications. My aim here is to consider these instruments’ interaction with the enduring racial legacies of the criminal justice system There are two competing lenses for evaluating the racial effects of algorithmic criminal justice: constitutional doctrine and emerging technical standards of “algorithmic fairness.” I argue first that constitutional doctrine is poorly suited to the task. It will often fail to capture the full range of racial issues that potentially arise in …

Sexual Harassment And Corporate Law, Daniel Hemel, Dorothy S. Lund

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The year 2017 marked an inflection point in the evolution of social norms regarding sexual harassment. While victims of workplace harassment had long suffered in silence, the surfacing of serious sexual misconduct allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein encouraged many more victims to tell their personal stories of abuse. These scandals have spread beyond Hollywood to the rest of corporate America, leading to the departures of several high-profile executives as well as sharp stock price declines at a number of firms. In the past year, shareholders at four publicly traded companies have filed lawsuits alleging that corporate directors and officers …

Innovation Policy Pluralism, Daniel J. Hemel, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

When lawyers and scholars speak of “intellectual property,” they are generally referring to a combination of two distinct elements: an innovation incentive that promises a marketbased reward to producers of knowledge goods, and an allocation mechanism that makes access to knowledge goods conditional upon payment of a proprietary price. Distinguishing these two elements clarifies ongoing debates about intellectual property and opens up new possibilities for innovation policy. Once intellectual property is disaggregated into its core components, each element can be combined synergistically with non-IP innovation incentives such as prizes, tax preferences, and direct spending on grants and government research, or …

Reconsidering Design And Evaluation, Andrew S. Gibbons Iii, David D. Williams

Faculty Publications

In this paper we have put design and evaluation as it were under a microscope with multiple lenses. We use four different snapshots of design, each at a different level of resolution, to reveal new perspectives on the design-evaluation relationship. We believe that the disparate views of designers and evaluators can be resolved by resorting to the middle ground described by Klir. We believe also that the disparate views of educational technologists and learning scientists can be similarly resolved by appealing to the similar principle of Edelson.

Operating & Capital Budget Plans 2017-2018, Office Of Planning, Budget, And Analysis

UNM HLC 2018-19 Assurance Argument Evidence

Coming out of the Budget office, these budget plans are the "best estimate of financial activity for the University during FY 2019 (July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019)" (2). The plans are organized along the lines of the consolidated budget, the main campus budget, HSC budget, branch campuses, and general capital.

About Sgcp, Faculty Senate

UNM HLC 2018-19 Assurance Argument Evidence

This is information on the Senate Graduate and Professional Committee (SGPC) as published on the web. As it is put, the SGPC is part of the Faculty Senate and is "responsible for maintaining and enhancing the quality of graduate/professional education in the University and its graduate and/or professional centers" through its leadership and initiatives in various areas of faculty governance (the page here gives seven different examples of this). This document also includes the 2017-2018 list of committee members. Information on and charges to the SGCP is also present in the Faculty Handbook (section A61.11).

Research2020 The Strategic Plan Of The Unm Office Of The Vice President For Research, University Research

UNM HLC 2018-19 Assurance Argument Evidence

This brief report from the OVPR exemplifies the nature of the work being done by the office in focusing on UNM's research sector.

Academic Program Review, Process And Procedures (Eighth Edition), Office Of Assessment And The Academic Program Review Office

UNM HLC 2018-19 Assurance Argument Evidence

This is the eighth edition of the APR manual, efficacious since August 2018. This comprehensively details the APR process of UNM, including documenting its Guiding Principles (p. 6), and the format for a program's "Plan of Action" (p.11).

Strategic Plan Summary, Office Of The President

UNM HLC 2018-19 Assurance Argument Evidence

This is a document from the 2017-18 FY that shows the way the seven goals of UNM2020 were formed into concrete institutional strategies. Several strategies were formed from each goal, with corresponding objectives for each strategy. Each goal has a completion target and the assignment of responsibility to an administrator.