Digital Commons Network^™

A Comprehensive Review Of The Sinuvertebral Nerve With Clinical Applications., Brian Shayota, T L Wong, Donald Fru, Glen David, Joe Iwanaga, Marios Loukas, R Shane Tubbs

Articles, Abstracts, and Reports

The anatomy and clinical significance of the sinuvertebral nerve is a topic of considerable interest among anatomists and clinicians, particularly its role in discogenic pain. It has required decades of research to appreciate its role, but not until recently could these studies be compiled to establish a more complete description of its clinical significance. The sinuvertebral nerve is a recurrent nerve that originates from the ventral ramus, re-entering the spinal canal via the intervertebral foramina to innervate multiple meningeal and non-meningeal structures. Its complex anatomy and relationship to discogenic pain have warranted great interest among clinical anatomists owing to its …

Hdl Subclass Proteomic Analysis And Functional Implication Of Protein Dynamic Change During Hdl Maturation, Yuling Zhang, Scott M. Gordon, Hang Xi, Seungbum Choi, Merlin Abner Paz, Runlu Sun, William Yang, Jason Saredy, Mohsin Khan, Alan Thomas Remaley, Jing-Feng Wang, Xiaofeng Yang, Hong Wang

Saha Cardiovascular Research Center Faculty Publications

Recent clinical trials reported that increasing high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) levels does not improve cardiovascular outcomes. We hypothesize that HDL proteome dynamics determine HDL cardioprotective functions. In this study, we characterized proteome profiles in HDL subclasses and established their functional connection. Mouse plasma was fractionized by fast protein liquid chromatography, examined for protein, cholesterial, phospholipid and trigliceride content. Small, medium and large (S/M/L)-HDL subclasseses were collected for proteomic analysis by mass spectrometry. Fifty-one HDL proteins (39 in S-HDL, 27 in M-HDL and 29 in L-HDL) were identified and grouped into 4 functional categories (lipid metabolism, immune response, coagulation, and others). Eleven …

Biologics Under A New Nafta: How Tpp Fixed Nafta's Intellectual Property Provisions But Not Its Investment Provisions, Jordan Jensen

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Scientific developments, such as biologics and personalized medicine, have created an entirely new category of pharmaceutical drugs that were not considered when the North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”) was adopted in 1994. However, the rise of biologics has increased demand for a reconfigured NAFTA, particularly with respect to Chapter 17, which outlines NAFTA’s robust intellectual property standards, as well as Chapter 11, which both lays out the framework for foreign investment under NAFTA and introduces a controversial mechanism referred to as the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism (“ISDS”). The intellectual property provisions of the original NAFTA should be revised to …

Evolving And Sustaining Ocean Best Practices And Standards For The Next Decade, Frank Muller-Karger

Marine Science Faculty Publications

The oceans play a key role in global issues such as climate change, food security, and human health. Given their vast dimensions and internal complexity, efficient monitoring and predicting of the planet’s ocean must be a collaborative effort of both regional and global scale. A first and foremost requirement for such collaborative ocean observing is the need to follow well-defined and reproducible methods across activities: from strategies for structuring observing systems, sensor deployment and usage, and the generation of data and information products, to ethical and governance aspects when executing ocean observing. To meet the urgent, planet-wide challenges we face, …

In Search Of Red Noctiluca Scintillans Blooms In The East China Sea, Lin Qi, Sheng-Fang Tsai, Yanlong Chen, Chengfeng Le, Chuanmin Hu

Marine Science Faculty Publications

Red Noctiluca scintillans (RNS) is one of the major species causing red tides and bioluminescence, yet extremely difficult to track due to its ephemeral nature. Here, we show that RNS can be fingerprinted from satellite data due to its unique absorption and scattering properties. Retrospective analysis of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer data of 2000–2017 over the East China Sea reveals seasonal patterns and interannual changes as well as an increasing RNS bloom trend, all driven by hydrographical and biological factors and possibly by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Unlike earlier reports from field measurements, RNS blooms …

Is There A Social Hierarchy In The Heifer Herd Of Finca Paraíso?, June 2019, Kai Patterson

Monteverde Institute: Tropical Ecology and Conservation

Dairy cows were domesticated about 10,500 years ago and have been used for milk production ever since. In Costa Rica, they usually live in herds in pastures, therefore they spend most of their time near each other. Research shows they have hierarchies which can be influenced by size, age, and lactation cycle. In this study, I set out to find the social hierarchy in a herd of heifers who are of similar age and size, and do not have a lactation cycle. I traveled to La Finca Paraíso to observe heifers for a total of 12 hours, and recorded every …

Factors That Limit Establishment Of Stony Corals, June 2019, Michelle C. Temby

Monteverde Institute: Tropical Ecology and Conservation

Corals occupy less than 1% of the surface area of world oceans but provide a home for 25% of all marine fish species. Nevertheless, corals do not get the attention they deserve in terms of their success as organisms. In my study, I analyze individual coral heads, specifically the genus Pocillopora (tentative identification: Pocillopora elegans), and their establishments in Cuajiniquil using 3 locations in Guanacaste, Costa Rica to understand why coral reefs are not establishing at some sites. These sites occur at Bajo Rojo, Bahía Thomas West, and Isla David. I recorded the size of establishing coral heads, the surrounding …

Tropical Bivalves In Extreme Storms: Survivorship And Filtration In Response To Salinity, June 2019, Haley Hudson

Monteverde Institute: Tropical Ecology and Conservation

Bivalve water filtration provides important ecosystem services that can help to offset anthropogenic pollution and other human induced ecosystem imbalances. Pinctada mazatlanica, Pteria sterna, and Modiolus capax are bivalves that grow on fish mariculture nets filtering fish feces from the water. Bivalves can help make fish mariculture a more sustainable alternative to overfishing. However, freshwater from extreme storms threaten these species. Tropical Storm Nate caused salinity changes in marine ecosystems resulting in widespread destruction. Little was known about how Tropical Storm Nate affected bivalves. In my study, I addressed the question: How are survivorship and filtration rates of Pinctada mazatlanica, …

Computational Neuroscience, Arnold Gashi

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding how the brain works is a challenge that is attracting a number of scientists from many disciplines. This thesis is a study, to understand some of the models that explain the procedure how the brain works. By understanding computational models of the brain, we as programmers can create simulated programs that try to mimic brain behavior, and using them in many divisions of technology. CNS is very wide field and has so many things to cover this thesis will cover the basic construction of the brain, from neurons, as the principle cell of nervous system, to understand their complex …

2019-2020 Fall Bulletin, University Of Mississippi Medical Center

Bulletins/Catalogs

2019-2020 Fall Bulletin

Expierience, Lukas Suess, Caleb Biggers, Chris Pestano, Gabriel Nguyen

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to create a realistic diving simulation to allow users to see what it is like to dive beneath the Cal Poly Pier. As it is now, the simulation includes a model of the pier, a few species, and the framework for user movement. These features were created by the previous project teams. Our team will make additions to the existing project such as more creatures and life. Before any additions are added, the existing code must be optimized. This project will show users how scientific surveys can be conducted, so the ability to conduct …

Tidalsim Senior Project Report, Kent Zhang, Colin Vandervoort

Computer Engineering

Throughout the course of this project, our team helped the Cal Poly Biological Sciences department refine an intertidal zone simulator. The aim of this device is to allow any marine biologist to easily simulate a vast range of tidal zones in order to test animal behaviors within these zones. Another goal of this project is to make each simulation tank independent from the others by using a single microcontroller to handle all inputs and outputs of the system as well as logging all relevant data. The current system is set up so that a separate microcontroller handles dissolved oxygen and …

Natural Kinds And Ceteris Paratis Generalizations: In Praise Of Hunches, W. Christropher Boyd, Richard N. Boyd

Chemistry Faculty Publications

According to stereotypical logical empiricist conceptions, scientific findings are approximately true (or perhaps true ceteris paribus) law-like generalizations used to predict natural phenomena. They are deployed using topic-neutral, generally reliable inferential principles like deductive or statistical inferences. Natural kinds are the kinds in such generalizations. Chemical examples show that such conceptions are seriously incomplete. Some important chemical generalizations are true often enough, even though not usually true, and they are applied using esoteric topic- and discipline-specific inference rules. Their important methodological role is to underwrite often-enough reliable, often socially implemented, scientifically informed guessing about chemical phenomena. Some chemical natural …

Protecting Local Authority In State Constitutions And Challenging Intrastate Preemption, Emily S.P. Baxter

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In recent years, state legislatures have increasingly passed laws that prohibit or preempt local action on a variety of issues, including fracking, LGBTQIA nondiscrimination, and workplace protections, among others. Often, these preemption laws are a direct response to action at the local level. States pass preemption laws either directly before or directly after a locality passes an ordinance on the same subject. Scholars have seen these preemptive moves as the outcome of the urban disadvantage in state and national government due to partisan gerrymandering.

Preemption may be a feature of our governing system, but it has also become a problematic …

Different Problems Require Different Solutions: How Air Warfare Norms Should Inform Ihl Targeting Law Reform & Cyber Warfare, Christian H. Robertson Ii

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

On February 19, 2018, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed that he was “absolutely convinced” that “the next war will begin with a massive cyber-attack to destroy military capacity . . . and paralyze basic infrastructure.” The Secretary-General’s greatest concern, however, is that he believes “there is no regulatory scheme for that type of warfare, it is not clear how the Geneva Convention or international humanitarian law applies to it.” Although Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (AP I) targeting laws generally identify who and what States may target in war, it expressly limits itself to attacks affecting people …

Harbor Notes, June 2019, University Of South Florida St. Petersburg. Office Of University Advancement.

Harbor Notes

The June 2019, issue of Harbor Notes.

Robot Navigation In Cluttered Environments With Deep Reinforcement Learning, Ryan Weideman

Master's Theses

The application of robotics in cluttered and dynamic environments provides a wealth of challenges. This thesis proposes a deep reinforcement learning based system that determines collision free navigation robot velocities directly from a sequence of depth images and a desired direction of travel. The system is designed such that a real robot could be placed in an unmapped, cluttered environment and be able to navigate in a desired direction with no prior knowledge. Deep Q-learning, coupled with the innovations of double Q-learning and dueling Q-networks, is applied. Two modifications of this architecture are presented to incorporate direction heading information that …

The Effects Of Providing Social And Nutritional Enrichment To Dairy Calves On Development, Behavior And Learning, Kendra Leigh Kutina

Master's Theses

The objective of this study was to measure the effects of both a nutritional (water nipple) and social (partner calf) enrichment on calf body weight, grain intake, water intake, behavior and learning. The enrichments included 1) water provided from a nipple vs. a bucket (nutritional) and 2) visual and tactile access to a partner vs. isolated rearing with no visual or tactile access to a partner calf (social). A total of 72 Holstein and Jersey dairy calves were pseudo-randomly distributed into 4 treatments at birth [Individual/Bucket (IB), Paired/Bucket (PB), Individual/Nipple (IN), Paired/Nipple (PN)]. Socially and nutritionally enriched calves drank more …

Foster Parent Satisfaction With The Foster Care System And Their Intentions To Decertification, Karla Valdez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Foster home placement has been gradually decreasing and this study focused on foster parents’ support system and the reasons leading to decertification. Specifically, this study aimed to find out how foster parents felt about the foster agency and other child protective services agencies. This study targeted the foster care system within an agency located in Riverside, California.

The research method used in the study was post positivism, which was a paradigm that allowed flexibility within the study, using qualitative data-gathering methods such as face-to-face interviews in the foster homes. Nine foster parents participated in the study. The results of the …

On The Use Of Multimedia In Twitter Health Communication: Analysis Of Tweets Regarding The Zika Virus, Jungwon Yoon, Loni Hagen, James Andrews, Ryan Scharf, Thomas Keller, Eunkyung Chung

School of Information Faculty Publications

Introduction: This study investigated influences of multimedia tweets on retweetablity during public health crises, in order to provide evidence for facilitating effective use of Twitter for health communication.

Method: Using the Twitter stream API, a total of 359,043 Zika-related tweets were collected for analysis.

Analysis: The sampled tweets were quantitatively analysed using descriptive statistics and chi-squared tests. For content analysis, subsets of the dataset were manually coded.

Results: 1) text tweets were sent out more frequently than multimedia tweets, but multimedia tweets had higher retweetability, 2) tweets by government, mainstream news media, and online news media …

Beef Production Systems In The Nebraska Sandhills, Mckay Reed Erickson

Department of Animal Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Four studies were conducted to determine the effectiveness of improving production systems of beef cattle in the Sandhills region of Nebraska. These studies were to determine impacts of modified estrus synchronization protocols, genomic testing heifer calves for longevity, and evaluation of 2 differing calving systems (March or May) for improving biological outcome and improved production. Experiment 1 utilized 180 yearling heifers to determine the effectiveness of a second dose of prostaglandin F_2α(PGF) with those females not expressing estrus after an initial 14 d MGA-PG estrus synchronization protocol. The treatment of PGF did increase estrus expression, but did not …

June 2019, Peter Grant

aCAdemicS: The Newsletter of the SWOSU College of Arts & Sciences

With the advent of digitization, documents are much more easily stored and located. SWOSU Digital Commons is loaded with digitized documents. It is organized by Mr. Phillip Fitzsimmons, Reference and Digitization Librarian, in the Al Harris Library. One can find past issues of The Southwestern, minutes from Faculty Senate meetings, past issues of Echoes from the Hill, student and faculty research articles and posters, and issues of this newsletter, aCAdemicS. Mr. Fitzsimmons recently provided usage statistics for the 28 issues of this newsletter: it has been downloaded 672 times from 32 institutions in 41 countries.

A Deeper Understanding Of The Minima Caste Function Of The Leafcutter Ants (Atta Cephalotes), June 2019, Crystal Ramirez

Monteverde Institute: Tropical Ecology and Conservation

Leafcutter ants Atta cephalotes (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), common to Central and South America, have a profound caste system to ensure the cultivation of a special fungus, Leucocoprinus gongylophorus, which is their main food source. Within the caste system, the workers job is to forage and carry back pieces of leaves that are necessary for fungus farming. The minima have long been thought to be protecting the worker ants from parasitic phorid flies (Diptera: Phoridae), who have been studied to await near the entrance of the nest to land on a leaf and lay eggs on the head of the worker ant. …

Azteca Ants Inhabiting Cecropia Trees Are Moving Up In Elevation In Monteverde, June 2019, Meghan R. Garfink

Monteverde Institute: Tropical Ecology and Conservation

Global climate change impacts ecological relationships of all taxa and kingdoms, yet little has been documented of the impact on insects. This study documents the changing elevational range of four Azteca ant species in Cecropia trees in the Monteverde cloud forest. In Monteverde, Costa Rica, many species of Cecropia form a mutualism with Azteca in which ants receive nutrients in exchange for protection of the tree. Data was collected in May 2019 and compared to similar studies done in 1989 (Longino), 2003 (Mazzei), 2008 (Loope), and 2016 (Jensen). Since 1989, maximum elevational range of Azteca increased by 132 meters. Average …

Intercampus Tension At Multi-Campus Institituions: A Phenomenological Study Of Higher Education Administrators, Steven Erickson

CUP Ed.D. Dissertations

While institutions spend more resources addressing affordability, access, and accountability measures, they face the added pressures of retirements in upcoming years. Consolidating administrative structures by forming multi-campus institutions is one potential solution that purports to save money and preserves access for students. Unfortunately, multi-campus institutions face intercampus tension that may reduce the expected gains in efficiency. In this phenomenological study, 11 experienced multi-campus administrators were interviewed regarding intercampus tension and leadership at multi-campus institutions. Analysis of the interview transcripts utilized Moustakas’ modification of van Kaam’s method and resulted in identifying competition for resources, differences in campus culture, local demands on …

Scholarly Communications Report On Activities 2018-19, Janelle Wertzberger

All Musselman Library Staff Works

2018-19 annual report for Scholarly Communications work at Musselman Library, including Gettysburg College's institutional repository, The Cupola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College. Covers June 2018-May 2019.

Analysis Of Candida Auris Fungemia At A Single Facility In Kenya, Rodney Adam, Gunturu Revathi, Nancy Okinda, Melanie Fontaine, Jasmit Shah, Elizabeth Kagotho, Mariana Castanheira, Michael A. Pfaller, Daniel Maina

Pathology, East Africa

Objectives: Candida auris emerged as a human pathogen in 2009 and has subsequently been identified around the world as a cause of invasive candidiasis. We did an analysis from a single institution in order to analyze risk factors and outcomes for C. auris candidemia.

Methods: Patients with candidemia were identified by the electronic medical record and reviewed for risk factors and outcome. Candida isolates were identified by Vitek2 as Candida haemulonii, but species determinations for 21 of the isolates using published molecular and proteomic methods identified all as C. auris.

Findings: From September 2010 to December 2016, C. auris accounted …

Interpolated Perturbation-Based Decomposition As A Method For Eeg Source Localization, Gabriel Zelik Lipof

Master's Theses

In this thesis, the perturbation-based decomposition technique developed by Szlavik [1] was used in an attempt to solve the inverse problem in EEG source localization. A set of dipole locations were forward modeled using a 4-layer sphere model of the head at uniformly distributed lead locations to form the vector basis necessary for the method. Both a two-dimensional and a pseudo-three-dimensional versions of the model were assessed with the two-dimensional model yielding decompositions with minimal error and the pseudo-three-dimensional version having unacceptable levels of error. The utility of interpolation as a method to reduce the number of data points to …

Evaluation Of Host Resistance And The Utilization Of Organic Amendments To Manage Macrophomina Crown Rot Of Strawberry In California, Jonathan W. Winslow

Master's Theses

The production of strawberries can be severely limited by soilborne plant pathogens, insects and weeds. Macrophomina phaseolina is a problematic soilborne fungal pathogen in California strawberry production inciting the disease Macrophomina crown rot. When established, the pathogen can cause extensive plant decline and mortality. Host resistance will be a critical tool for managing this disease and guiding breeding programs in the post methyl bromide era. Evaluation of host resistance in strawberry germplasm to M. phaseolina was evaluated through phenotypic assessments of disease incidence. A total of 90 strawberry cultivars and elite selections were included in a replicated field trial conducted …

Modifying Succession: A History Of Vegetation Alliances On Swanton Pacific Ranch, Jill Wilson O'Connor

Master's Theses

This thesis conducts historical research into Swanton Pacific Ranch in the County of Santa Cruz, an interdisciplinary facility for education and research managed by Cal Poly’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. The study seeks to determine whether there have been discernable changes in vegetation alliances (communities), spatially or in type, within a 110-acre Study Area from the early twentieth century to the present day and how the changes compare with other similar historical analyses in California. Historical farming and ranching uses of the area are researched, and two family case studies are presented as paradigms of potential changes …