Digital Commons Network^™

An Analysis Of Coyote (Canis Latrans) Abundance, Movement Patterns & Distribution, Jaclyn Findlay, Dominic Baechler, Peter Auger, Eric Strauss, Maria Curley, J. Kleya, Emily Simso

Center for Urban Resilience Research Posters

The LMU Center for Urban Resilience (CURes) is currently in the third year of a three-year project to inform a long-term coyote Canis latrans management plan for the City of Long Beach, California. This plan will be applied by the Long Beach Animal Care Services Bureau. The project consists of using game cameras set up at a tree nursery study site in Long Beach to determine coyote abundance, movement patterns, and distribution. This includes studying where the coyotes are spending the most time, if they are transient / mobile, what packs are present, and peak activity. Preliminary analysis of temporal …

Neural Processing Of Communication Signals: The Extent Of Sender–Receiver Matching Varies Across Species Of Apteronotus, Kathryne M. Allen, Gary Marsat

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

As communication signal properties change, through genetic drift or selective pressure, the sensory systems that receive these signals must also adapt to maintain sensitivity and adaptability in an array of contexts. Shedding light on this process helps us to understand how sensory codes are tailored to specific tasks. In a species of weakly electric fish, Apteronotus albifrons, we examined the unique neurophysiological properties that support the encoding of electrosensory communication signals that the animal encounters in social exchanges. We compare our findings to the known coding properties of the closely related species Apteronotus leptorhynchus to establish how these animals …

Investigation Of Dredge Material Dewatering Through Hydraulic And Ground Improvement Methods, Monica Moody

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Every year almost 1.5 million tons of material is dredged from Lake Erie to allow passage for boat traffic. In the past, this material has been placed back into the open waters of the lake. However, starting July 2020 this will no long be permitted due to the passing of Senate Bill 1. Therefore, secondary uses of this dredging material are being investigated. To be used, the material needs to be quickly dewatered and stabilized. This project consists of literary reviews of two methods of rapid dewatering, hydraulic placement and ground improvement methods. Hydraulic placement dewatering requires the use of …

Role Of The Oxytocin System In Alcohol Consumption And Stress-Induced Alcohol Relapse-Like Behavior, Courtney E. King

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

Alcoholism is a widespread public health concern with limited therapeutic interventions available to help individuals battle relapse, moderate their use, and sustain abstinence. While many variables contribute to relapse vulnerability, stress is considered to play a prominent role in triggering relapse. The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) has recently been implicated in a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, including drug and alcohol use disorders. Given that OXT is known to interact with brain reward systems and exert anxiolytic and anti-stress effects in humans and rodents, the main overall hypothesis of this dissertation is that OXT (and OXT receptor signaling) will be effective in …

Modeling Spatially-Referenced Maldi Imaging Data Using A Process Convolution Approach, Cameron Miller

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization Fourier-transform ion-cyclotron resonance (MALDI FT-ICR) imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) technology allows researchers to measure the abundance of ionized fragments over a two-dimensional space. Despite advances in IMS technology, methods used to analyze such data have lagged. In particular, the variability in IMS data can be attributed to both spatial and random sources. Additionally, the frequency of masses with high proportions of zero abundance measures is often quite large. To address these issues, we automate a procedure to account for spatial variability across multiple regions of interest. Using that procedure, we then develop and propose log-linear regression models …

College Of Psychology Graduate Student Catalog 2019-2020, Nova Southeastern University

College of Psychological Services / College of Psychology Postgraduate Student and Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Security: How Biometrics Spell A New Era Of Privacy And Security Concerns, And How To Best Protect Citizens Through Comprehensive Legislation, Thomas J. Scrivo

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Menippean Satire In The Digital Era: Gary Shteyngart’S Super Sad True Love Story, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Howard Weinbrot argues that Menippean satire tends to be produced in eras of "broken or fragile national, cultural, religious, political or generally intellectual values" (7). It protests cultural decadence and decline by incorporating contradiction into its form, using "at least two other genres, languages, cultures, or changes of voice to oppose a dangerous, false, or specious and threatening orthodoxy" (6). Although it may feature memorable characters, the Menippean mode primarily targets diseased and dangerous ideas or habits. It is encyclopedic in range and ambition, absorbing and parodying different discourses and genres while constructing a narrative via debates, fantasies, annotations (either …

Sticky: Taboo Topics In Deaf Communities, J. N. Fisher, G. Mirus, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

This chapter offers an overview of taboo topics within deaf communities to bring forward issues not obvious to those outside deaf communities. We look at taboo behaviors of hearing people as they interact with deaf communities, considering linguistic and cultural appropriation, exploitation, and hearing privilege. We also look at taboo topics regarding social hierarchies within deaf communities, those based on gender and race, as well as those based on cognitive abilities, particularly language. These topics present a nuanced and diverse representation of deaf people, which is intended to sensitize those aiming to work with deaf communities or, in fact, with …

Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies In Public Discourse, Jamie A. Thomas, C. Jackson

Linguistics Faculty Works

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

Between Zora Neale, Hamlet, And A “Dope Black Woman”: Revisiting Language Ideology Through Alysia Harris’S Performance Poetry, Jamie A. Thomas

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Trump And His Tweets: Presidential Propaganda And Its Potential Influence On The Actions Of Others, Stephanie Perry

Honors College Theses

No abstract provided.

Transgressive Or Traditional: Female-Centric Casting In Contemporary Shakespearean Performance, Katelyn Sparks

Honors College Theses

No abstract provided.

Charged Nanoparticles Quench The Propulsion Of Active Janus Colloids, Marola W. Issa, Nicky R. Baumgartner, Mohammed A. Kalil, Shawn D. Ryan, Christopher L. Wirth

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications

Active colloidal particles regularly interact with surfaces in applications ranging from microfluidics to sensing. Recent work has revealed the complex nature of these surface interactions for active particles. Herein, we summarize experiments and simulations that show the impact of charged nanoparticles on the propulsion of an active colloid near a boundary. Adding charged nanoparticles not only decreased the average separation distance of a passive colloid because of depletion attraction as expected but also decreased the apparent propulsion of a Janus colloid to near zero. Complementary agentbased simulations considering the impact of hydrodynamics for active Janus colloids were conducted in the …

Quality Of Life And Its Determinants In Subfertile Patients Seeking Fertility Care At Two Urban Fertility Centres In Nairobi, Lawrence Makoha Sikuku

Master of Medicine in Obstetrics and Gynecology

Introduction: Subfertility affects one in six couples worldwide with devastating psychosocial consequences impacting on quality of life (QoL). Assessment of QoL and institution of appropriate interventions in subfertility patients complements clinical management by reducing the psycho-social effects of subfertility and its treatment. No local or regional data exist on impact of subfertility on QoL using a fertility-specific QoL assessment tool. Objective: The study sought to determine the QoL of subfertile patients seeking fertility care at two urban fertility centres in Nairobi using the Fertility Quality of Life (FertiQoL) tool. Methods: This was a cross sectional study. Subfertile women of reproductive …

"I Should Have Known". The Perceptual Barriers Faced By Mental Health Practitioners In Recognizing And Responding To Their Own Burnout Symptoms, Marieke Ledingham, P Standen, Chris Skinner, Robbie Busch

Sciences Papers and Journal Articles

Studies have shown burnout to be a significant problem in the mental health field, causing workers serious health problems and reducing quality of care provided to clients. Yet despite mental health practitioners’ training in supporting others’ emotional health, they may be reluctant to seek help for burnout symptoms. This paper addresses this paradox by showing how human cognitive processes could act as powerful blocks to the recognition of and response to burnout. Fifty-five mental health practitioners’ beliefs and perceptions about burnout were examined using qualitative interview and survey data interpreted through a phenomenological perspective on attribution theory. The study identified …

2019 Georgia Southern University Football Roster, Georgia Southern University

Men's Football Records

• Georgia Southern University Athletics 2019 Football Roster

Discovery And Development Of Kdm4b Inhibitors To Target Periodontal Disease Progression, Joy Elizabeth Kirkpatrick

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

Periodontal disease (PD) affects nearly half of the adult United States population and is characterized by bacterial-driven inflammatory bone loss. Traditional and emerging treatments for periodontitis management do not typically target the host immune response, which is the major source of tissue damage. The demethylation activity of lysine-specific demethylase 1 (KDM1A) at histone 3 lysine 4 leads to a decrease in pro-inflammatory cytokine transcription. By contrast, lysine specific demethylase 4B (KDM4B) is a histone demethylase that specifically demethylates histone 3 trimethyllysine 9 (H3K9me3). Interestingly, previous data has shown that cross talk between these two enzymes leads to a balanced system …

Glial Dysfunction In Mouse Auditory Nerve Results In Dysmyelination And Nodal Abnormalities Leading To Loss In Hearing Function, Clarisse Hipolito Panganiban

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

The auditory nerve (AN) is an integral part of the auditory system and without it, we cannot hear sound. Glial cells insulate type I spiral ganglion neurons (SGNs) with myelin sheaths, which are protective and constrain electrical signal within SGNs, facilitating propagation. Formation of excitable nodal domains containing clusters of voltage-gated ion channels in unmyelinated gaps along axons also allow for rapid saltatory conduction. Sensorineural hearing loss is commonly attributed to loss of synaptic connections between the AN fibers and hair cells, hair cell loss, or SGN death. Primary glial dysfunction in the AN is not as well-studied. Demyelinating diseases …

Discrimination Of Breast Cancer From Benign Tumours Using Raman Spectroscopy, Fiona Lyng, Damien Traynor, Thi Nguyet Que Nguyen, Aidan Meade, Fazle Rakib, Rafif Al-Saady, Erik Goormaghtigh, Khalid Al-Saad, Mohamed H. Ali

Articles

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide, with an estimated 1.7 million cases and 522,000 deaths in 2012. Breast cancer is diagnosed by histopathological examination of breast biopsy material but this is subjective and relies on morphological changes in the tissue. Raman spectroscopy uses incident radiation to induce vibrations in the molecules of a sample and the scattered radiation can be used to characterise the sample. This technique is rapid and non-destructive and is sensitive to subtle biochemical changes occurring at the molecular level. This allows spectral variations corresponding to disease onset to be detected. The aim …

Novel Applications Of Machine Learning In Bioinformatics, Yi Zhang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Technological advances in next-generation sequencing and biomedical imaging have led to a rapid increase in biomedical data dimension and acquisition rate, which is challenging the conventional data analysis strategies. Modern machine learning techniques promise to leverage large data sets for finding hidden patterns within them, and for making accurate predictions. This dissertation aims to design novel machine learning-based models to transform biomedical big data into valuable biological insights. The research presented in this dissertation focuses on three bioinformatics domains: splice junction classification, gene regulatory network reconstruction, and lesion detection in mammograms.

A critical step in defining gene structures and mRNA …

Automated Network Security With Exceptions Using Sdn, Sergio A. Rivera Polanco

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Campus networks have recently experienced a proliferation of devices ranging from personal use devices (e.g. smartphones, laptops, tablets), to special-purpose network equipment (e.g. firewalls, network address translation boxes, network caches, load balancers, virtual private network servers, and authentication servers), as well as special-purpose systems (badge readers, IP phones, cameras, location trackers, etc.). To establish directives and regulations regarding the ways in which these heterogeneous systems are allowed to interact with each other and the network infrastructure, organizations typically appoint policy writing committees (PWCs) to create acceptable use policy (AUP) documents describing the rules and behavioral guidelines that all campus network …

Learning To Map The Visual And Auditory World, Tawfiq Salem

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The appearance of the world varies dramatically not only from place to place but also from hour to hour and month to month. Billions of images that capture this complex relationship are uploaded to social-media websites every day and often are associated with precise time and location metadata. This rich source of data can be beneficial to improve our understanding of the globe. In this work, we propose a general framework that uses these publicly available images for constructing dense maps of different ground-level attributes from overhead imagery. In particular, we use well-defined probabilistic models and a weakly-supervised, multi-task training …

Hadoop-Edf: Large-Scale Distributed Processing Of Electrophysiological Signal Data In Hadoop Mapreduce, Yuanyuan Wu

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The rapidly growing volume of electrophysiological signals has been generated for clinical research in neurological disorders. European Data Format (EDF) is a standard format for storing electrophysiological signals. However, the bottleneck of existing signal analysis tools for handling large-scale datasets is the sequential way of loading large EDF files before performing an analysis. To overcome this, we develop Hadoop-EDF, a distributed signal processing tool to load EDF data in a parallel manner using Hadoop MapReduce. Hadoop-EDF uses a robust data partition algorithm making EDF data parallel processable. We evaluate Hadoop-EDF’s scalability and performance by leveraging two datasets from the National …

To The Humanities: What Does Communication Studies Give?, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as 1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; 2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, …

Effect Of Strength On Velocity And Power During Back Squat Exercise In Resistance-Trained Men And Women, Andrew T. Askow, Justin J. Merrigan, Jonathan M. Neddo, Jonathan M. Oliver, Jason D. Stone, Andrew R. Jagim, Margaret T. Jones

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose was to examine load-velocity and load-power relationships of back squat in resistance-trained men (n = 20, 21.3 ± 1.4 years, 183.0 ± 8.0 cm, 82.6 ± 8.0 kg, 11.5 ± 5.0% total body fat) and women (n = 18; 20.0 ± 1.0 years; 166.5 ± 6.9 cm; 63.9 ± 7.9 kg, 20.3 ± 5.0% body fat). Body composition testing was performed followed by determination of back squat 1 repetition maximum (1RM). After at least 72 hours of recovery, subjects returned to the laboratory and completed 2 repetitions at each of 7 separate loads (30, 40, 50, …

Seasonal Variability Of Sediment Controls Of Carbon Cycling In An Agricultural Stream, Sophie Comer-Warner, Daren Gooddy, Sami Ullah, Luke Glover, Aishling Percival, Nicholas Kettridge, Stefan` Krause

Articles

Streams and rivers are‘active pipelines’where high rates of carbon (C) turnover can lead to globally importantemissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) from surface waters to the atmosphere. Streambed sedi-ments are particularly important in affecting stream chemistry, with rates of biogeochemical activity, and CO2and CH4concentrations far exceeding those in surface waters. Despite an increase in research on CO2and CH4instreambed sediments there is a lack of knowledge and insight on seasonal dynamics. In this study the seasonallyvariable effect of sediment type (sand-dominated versus gravel-dominated) on porewater C cycling, includingCO2and CH4concentrations, was investigated. We found high concentrations of CO2and CH4in the …

Impact Of Extraction Technique On The Volatile Oil Contents And Composition Of Four Ocimum Species; Microwave Assisted Extraction Versus Distillation Study, Dina M. El-Kersh, Dalia Rasheed, Manar Eissa

Pharmacy

Objectives: The aim of this study is to unravel the variabilities posed by alteration of the extraction technique employed on the contents and composition of essential oils derived from the same plant species Methods: Volatile oils of four different Ocimum species (Ocimum basilicum L., O. africanum Lour., O. americanum L. and O. minimum L. family Lamiaceae) were individually extracted from their fresh aerial parts using green microwave assisted extraction (MAE) method and conventional hydrodistillation (HD) and steam distillation (SD) methods. Extracted volatile oil samples were further analysed by GC-MS. Results: Qualitatively, distillation of the Ocimum samples resulted in higher yields …

The Culture-Structure Framework: Beyond The Cultural Competence Paradigm, Mimi E. Kim

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article provides a framework for understanding the distinctions between culture and structure in its application to the human services. Using intimate partner violence (IPV) as a case study, this article builds upon the contributions of intersectionality, which was first introduced as a critique of white-dominated IPV interventions. It also follows the development of the concept of cultural competence to demonstrate the ways in which it both opened opportunities to discuss cultural differences but also suppressed the analysis of racialized hierarchies of power, which are often muted by the elevation of culture over race. Finally, this article proposes a general …

The Web Of Legal Protections For Participants In Genomic Research, Leslie E. Wolf, Erin Fuse Brown, Ryan Kerr, Genevieve Razick, Gregory Tanner, Brett Duvall, Sakinah Jones, Jack Brackney, Tatiana Posada

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

The identification and arrest of the Golden State Killer using DNA uploaded to an ancestry database occurred shortly before recruitment for the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) All of Us Study commenced, with a goal of enrolling and collecting DNA, health, and lifestyle information from one million Americans. It also highlighted the need to ensure prospective research participants that their confidentiality will be protected and their materials used appropriately. But there are questions about how well current law protects against these privacy risks. This article is the first to consider comprehensively and simultaneously all the federal and state laws offering …