Digital Commons Network^™

2020-2021 Performance Forum - October 1, 2020, Zulfiya Bashirova, Guzal Isametdinova, Laura Gonzales, David Mersereau, Sheng Yuan Kuan, David Brill

Performance Forum

No abstract provided.

Chairs Of Excellence Annual Report 2020, Tennessee. Higher Education Commission.

Academic Programs and Workforce Reports

No abstract provided.

Characterization Of Genome-Wide Binding Of Nuclear-Factor I-X In Hematopoietic Progenitor Cells, Megan J. Walker

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

We report that ectopic expression of Nfix in primary mouse HSPC extended their ex vivo culture from 20 to 40 days. HSPC overexpressing Nfix displayed hypersensitivity to supportive cytokines and reduced apoptosis when subjected to cytokine deprivation compared to controls. Ectopic Nfix resulted in elevated levels of c-Mpl transcripts and cell surface protein on primary murine HSPC as well as increased phosphorylation of STAT5, which is known to be activated down-stream of c-MPL signaling. Blocking c-MPL signaling by removal of its ligand, thrombopoietin (TPO), or addition of a c-MPL neutralizing antibody negated the anti-apoptotic effect of Nfix overexpression on cultured …

Announcing The Isev2020 Special Achievement Award Recipients: Andrew Hill And Edit Buzás; And The Recipient Of The Isev2020 Special Education Award: Carolina Soekmadji., Kenneth W Witwer, Lucia R Languino, Alissa M Weaver, Marca H Wauben

Kimmel Cancer Center Faculty Papers

No abstract provided.

Changes In Lipid Profiles Of Epileptic Mouse Mode, Alicia Johnson, Ryan A. Grove, Deepak Madhavan, Cory H.T. Boone, Camila Pereira Braga, Hannah Kyllo, Kaeli K. Samson, Kristina A. Simeone, Timothy A. Simeone, Tomáš Helikar, Corrine K. Hanson, Jiri Adamec

Department of Biochemistry: Faculty Publications

Introduction Approximately 1% of the world’s population is impacted by epilepsy, a chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. One-third of epileptic patients are resistant to AEDs, or have medically refractory epilepsy (MRE). One non-invasive treatment that exists for MRE includes the ketogenic diet (KD), a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Despite the KD’s success in seizure attenuation, it has a few risks and its mechanisms remain poorly understood. The KD has been shown to improve metabolism and mitochondrial function in epileptic phenotypes. Potassium channels have implications in epileptic conditions as they have dual roles as metabolic sensors and control neuronal excitation.

Objectives …

Clinical Significance Of Saussurea Costus In Thyroid Treatment, Muhammad Mujammami

Saudi Medical Journal

Saussurea costus (S. costus) belongs to family of Asteraceae and is one of the therapeutic plants extensively used as a traditional medicine in Saudi Arabia. Constituents of this plant have the potential to be developed as bioactive molecules. Among Arabs, the prevalence of thyroid disorders ranges from 6.18 % to 47.34% and hypothyroidism has been reported to be the most prevalent. Although there is no natural treatment that can directly replace thyroid hormones, their role as an alternate treatment or as an add-on to available thyroid treatment has been explored. Flavanoids and antioxidant properties of S. costus may be an …

A Brief Overview Of Analyzing Testing Procedures In The Quality Control Lab At Elanco Animal Health, Gina Fedrighi

Annual Student Research Poster Session

The study of testing procedures within the quality control lab was conducted at Elanco Animal Health through the summer internship program. The internship program focuses on the development of young professionals as research and manufacturing leaders in the pharmaceutical industry. The purpose of this project was to determine ways in which to save both time and money in the quality control lab through the study of various quality testing procedures. Quality Control plays a vital role in the manufacturing process in order to ensure quality of products and consistency between batches. It is important to improve upon the current testing …

Uncovering The Complex Genetics Of Human Temperament, Igor Zwir, Javier Arnedo, Coral Del-Val, Laura Pulkki-Råback, Bettina Konte, Sarah S. Yang, Rocio Romero-Zaliz, Mirka Hintsanen, Kevin M. Cloninger, Gabriel A. De Erausquin

School of Medicine Publications

Experimental studies of learning suggest that human temperament may depend on the molecular mechanisms for associative conditioning, which are highly conserved in animals. The main genetic pathways for associative conditioning are known in experimental animals, but have not been identified in prior genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of human temperament. We used a data-driven machine learning method for GWAS to uncover the complex genotypic–phenotypic networks and environmental interactions related to human temperament. In a discovery sample of 2149 healthy Finns, we identified sets of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that cluster within particular individuals (i.e., SNP sets) regardless of phenotype. Second, we identified …

Interests And Priorities In Sockeye Salmon Management: How Are Policies Enacted And Interpreted On Three Alaskan Rivers?, Jake P. Palazzi

University Honors Theses

The large export abundance of Alaskan salmon is well documented, and many studies have been performed to assess the economic and environmental viability of the industry and its management. Less research has been done to characterize how state intentions regarding fisheries allocation are conceived of by management or perceived by vulnerable groups in the user pool. This study seeks to qualitatively characterize the disconnect between state and Native Alaskan perceptions of management effectiveness, public interest, and Native Alaskan involvement using interviews. Results showed that Native Alaskan and state manager respondents had very different perceptions of management effectiveness and equity. When …

Disney's Reign Over Independent Cinema: How Mega-Corporations Are Commercializing Creativity, Hannah Z. Dawson

University Honors Theses

The Walt Disney Company is undoubtedly a monopoly in the media industry space. Their impressive acquisitions have expanded their portfolio to corner the market in nearly every genre. Most recently, the company has hired independent directors in hopes of re-invigorating and creating variety between multiple brands and franchises. But the directors' authoritative voices are lost under the Disney brand, which I argue overshadows independent autonomy and potentially envelopes the rest of the media market. Brandishing this massive media force, Disney (and its other subsidiary branches) promotes palatable, conservative leaning "family friendly" content that leads to a wider chance of profit. …

Supporting Interests And Sharing Power: Insights From A Scottish Youth Program, Daniela Kruel Digiacomo

Journal of Youth Development

Light Up Learning (LUL) is a youth program in Scotland that supports young people in pursuing their curiosities and exploring their interests in a school-based informal learning setting. This article draws on interview and participant observation data to examine the social organization of teaching and learning activity within LUL. As a school-based program focused on supporting youth in pursuing their interests through the cultivation of a caring adult–youth relationship, LUL offers an empirical case that brings together insights from youth development and interest-driven learning research. Examination into the verbal and material interactions that shape adult–youth interactions yields insight into how …

Development Of A Grass Measurement Optimisation Tool To Efficiently Measure Herbage Mass On Grazed Pastures, D. J. Murphy, B. O'Brien, Michael D. Murphy

Publications

Accurate and efficient estimation of herbage mass is essential for optimising grass utilisation and increasing profit for pasture farming. There is no definitive sampling protocol for grass measurement on Irish pastures. This paper presents the Grass Measurement Optimisation Tool (GMOT), designed to generate measurement protocols that optimise for time and accuracy. The GMOT was designed in the form of a decision support tool that generates interactive paddock maps that guide the farmer on how to optimally measure their pastures in a random stratified manner based on GPS co-ordinates, resulting in accurate non-biased estimations of mean herbage mass. Rising plate meter …

The Central Melanocortin System And Human Obesity, Yongjie Yang, Yong Xu

Children’s Nutrition Research Center Staff Publications

The prevalence of obesity and the associated comorbidities highlight the importance of understanding the regulation of energy homeostasis. The central melanocortin system plays a critical role in controlling body weight balance. Melanocortin neurons sense and integrate the neuronal and hormonal signals, and then send regulatory projections, releasing anorexigenic or orexigenic melanocortin neuropeptides, to downstream neurons to regulate the food intake and energy expenditure. This review summarizes the latest progress in our understanding of the role of the melanocortin pathway in energy homeostasis. We also review the advances in the identification of human genetic variants that cause obesity via mechanisms that …

Substantive Due Process And A Comparison Of Approaches To Sexual Liberty, William Council

Fordham Law Review

Over 150 years ago, Congress passed and the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, banning states from passing or enforcing laws based on unconstitutional classifications and protecting persons in the United States from adjudication without due process. For over one hundred years, however, courts and commentators have been fighting over the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause’s controversial protections of substantive rights. The U.S. Supreme Court has applied inconsistent methodologies to these substantive due process claims, attempting to walk a tightrope between the Court’s power to subjectively announce new rights as “fundamental” and the traditional role of the states’ plenary police powers. …

Opening Pandora’S Jury Box, B. Samantha Helgason

Fordham Law Review

More than sixty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Remmer v. United States, thereby defining what procedural steps restore a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial in the face of a contaminated or partial jury. Remmer, a case replete with evidence of jury tampering and covert investigations, fashioned the remedy for future courts to redress allegations of jury taint. Upon making out a prima facie case, a defendant is entitled to an evidentiary hearing, at which the evidence is presumed to prejudice the defendant, and the government bears the burden of rebutting. In Remmer’s wake, however, the …

Interpretable Embedding For Ad-Hoc Video Search, Jiaxin Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Answering query with semantic concepts has long been the mainstream approach for video search. Until recently, its performance is surpassed by concept-free approach, which embeds queries in a joint space as videos. Nevertheless, the embedded features as well as search results are not interpretable, hindering subsequent steps in video browsing and query reformulation. This paper integrates feature embedding and concept interpretation into a neural network for unified dual-task learning. In this way, an embedding is associated with a list of semantic concepts as an interpretation of video content. This paper empirically demonstrates that, by using either the embedding features or …

Two-Stage Photograph Cartoonization Via Line Tracing, Simin Li, Qiang Wen, Shuang Zhao, Zixun Sun, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cartoon is highly abstracted with clear edges, which makes it unique from the other art forms. In this paper, we focus on the essential cartoon factors of abstraction and edges, aiming to cartoonize real-world photographs like an artist. To this end, we propose a two-stage network, each stage explicitly targets at producing abstracted shading and crisp edges respectively. In the first abstraction stage, we propose a novel unsupervised bilateral flattening loss, which allows generating high-quality smoothing results in a label-free manner. Together with two other semantic-aware losses, the abstraction stage imposes different forms of regularization for creating cartoon-like flattened images. …

The South, The West, And The Meanings Of Humanitarian Intervention In History, Patrick Quinton-Brown

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

As it has been written, the history of humanitarian intervention is all too Whiggish and all too white. By conceptualising humanitarian intervention in the way that they do, orthodox histories should be seen as entangled in debates about the origins of human rights but also, perhaps more crucially, debates about the various formations and reinventions of human rights. Alternative codifications of rights reveal the historical possibility of a Southern practice of what we would almost certainly call ‘humanitarian intervention’. The record of a radical Third World practice to save strangers from the atrocities of colonialism and extreme racism is also …

Meta-Rcnn: Meta Learning For Few-Shot Object Detection, Xiongwei Wu, Doyen Sahoo, Steven Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite significant advances in deep learning based object detection in recent years, training effective detectors in a small data regime remains an open challenge. This is very important since labelling training data for object detection is often very expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we investigate the problem of few-shot object detection, where a detector has access to only limited amounts of annotated data. Based on the meta-learning principle, we propose a new meta-learning framework for object detection named "Meta-RCNN", which learns the ability to perform few-shot detection via meta-learning. Specifically, Meta-RCNN learns an object detector in an episodic learning …

Can Functional Traits Explain Plant Coexistence? A Case Study With Tropical Lianas And Trees, Felipe N. A. Mello, Sergio Estrada Villegas, David M. Defilippis, Stefan A. Schnitzer

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Organisms are adapted to their environment through a suite of anatomical, morphological, and physiological traits. These functional traits are commonly thought to determine an organism’s tolerance to environmental conditions. However, the differences in functional traits among co-occurring species, and whether trait differences mediate competition and coexistence is still poorly understood. Here we review studies comparing functional traits in two co-occurring tropical woody plant guilds, lianas and trees, to understand whether competing plant guilds differ in functional traits and how these differences may help to explain tropical woody plant coexistence. We examined 36 separate studies that compared a total of 140 …

Evidence For Craniofacial Enhancer Variation Underlying Nonsyndromic Cleft Lip And Palate, Vershanna E Morris, S Shahrukh Hashmi, Lisha Zhu, Lorena Maili, Christian Urbina, Steven Blackwell, Matthew R Greives, Edward P Buchanan, John B Mulliken, Susan H Blanton, W Jim Zheng, Jacqueline T Hecht, Ariadne Letra

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Nonsyndromic cleft lip with or without cleft palate (NSCLP) is a common birth defect for which only ~ 20% of the underlying genetic variation has been identified. Variants in noncoding regions have been increasingly suggested to contribute to the missing heritability. In this study, we investigated whether variation in craniofacial enhancers contributes to NSCLP. Candidate enhancers were identified using VISTA Enhancer Browser and previous publications. Prioritization was based on patterning defects in knockout mice, deletion/duplication of craniofacial genes in animal models and results of whole exome/whole genome sequencing studies. This resulted in 20 craniofacial enhancers to be investigated. Custom amplicon-based …

Toward A Visual History Of Smell In Eighteenth-Century France, Cameron C. Emamdjomeh

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

3d Face Reconstruction From Single 2d Image Using Distinctive Features, H. M. Rehan Afzal, Suhuai Luo, M. Kamran Afzal, Gopal Chaudhary, Manju Khari, Sathish Kumar

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

3D face reconstruction is considered to be a useful computer vision tool, though it is difficult to build. This paper proposes a 3D face reconstruction method, which is easy to implement and computationally efficient. It takes a single 2D image as input, and gives 3D reconstructed images as output. Our method primarily consists of three main steps: feature extraction, depth calculation, and creation of a 3D image from the processed image using a Basel face model (BFM). First, the features of a single 2D image are extracted using a two-step process. Before distinctive-features extraction, a face must be detected to …

Thirteenth Amendment Litigation In The Immigration Detention Context, Jennifer Safstrom

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article analyzes how the Thirteenth Amendment has been used to prevent forced labor practices in immigration detention. The Article assesses the effectiveness of Thirteenth Amendment litigation by dissecting cases where detainees have challenged the legality of labor requirements under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Given the expansion in immigration detention, the increasing privatization of detention, and the significant human rights implications of this issue, the arguments advanced in this Article are not only currently relevant but have the potential to shape ongoing dialogue on this subject.

Expanding The Reach Of Progressive Prosecution, Jeffrey Bellin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Symposium comes at a critical juncture for America's prosecutors. One important question-"Is there room for a new kind of prosecutor?"- has already been answered. Self-styled "progressive prosecutors" are flourishing in jurisdictions across the country. The question remains whether the progressive prosecutor movement will have a lasting impact and, if so, what that impact will be. One way this question will be answered is through the movement's influence on the many prosecutors who are open to reform but unlikely to adopt the "progressive" label or accompanying rhetoric. This Essay explores this theme by discussing, first, the rise of progressive prosecution …

Adaptive Management For Ecosystem Services, J. B. Ruhl, Robin Kundis Craig

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Managing the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is a widely-recognized land use problem plagued by a fractured geography of land parcels, management jurisdictions, and governance mandates and objectives. People who work in this field have suggested a variety of approaches to managing this interface, from informal governance to contracting to insurance. To date, however, none of these scholars has fully embraced the dynamism, uncertainty, and complexity of the WUI—that is, its status as a complex adaptive system. In focusing almost exclusively on the management of this interface to control wildfire, this scholarship largely ignores the fact that rampant wildfire is itself the …

Marching Through The Floating World: Processions In Ukiyo-E Prints (2020), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"Marching through the Floating World is a book that accompanies a student curated virtual exhibition of the same title. This exhibition is dedicated to images of processions in ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

Ukiyo-e or “pictures of the floating world” was a vibrant style of urban art that flourished in Japan in the 17th- 19th century, predominantly in the form of mass-produced woodcuts. Steeped in everyday pleasurable pastimes of townspeople, ukiyo-e prints reflected contemporary culture to its fullest, whether fact or fiction, often the two amalgamated in a witty way.

Processions constituted a noticeable theme in ukiyo-e prints as they were an …

Ford's Jurisdictional Crossroads, Linda Sandstrom Simard, Cassandra Burke Robertson, Charles "Rocky" Rhodes

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

“Something There Is That Doesn’T Love A Wall:” A Reflection On The Constitutional Vulnerabilities Of The Southwest Border Wall, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Pharmacologic Ire1/Xbp1s Activation Confers Targeted Er Proteostasis Reprogramming, J. M. D. Grandjean, A. Madhavan, L. Cech, B. O. Seguinot, R. J. Paxman, E. Smith, L. Scampavia, E. T. Powers, Christina B. Cooley, L. Plate, T. P. Spicer, J. W. Kelly, R. L. Wiseman

Chemistry Faculty Research

Activation of the IRE1/XBP1s signaling arm of the unfolded protein response (UPR) is a promising strategy to correct defects in endoplasmic reticulum (ER) proteostasis implicated in diverse diseases. However, no pharmacologic activators of this pathway identified to date are suitable for ER proteostasis remodeling through selective activation of IRE1/XBP1s signaling. Here, we use high-throughput screening to identify non-toxic compounds that induce ER proteostasis remodeling through IRE1/XBP1s activation. We employ transcriptional profiling to stringently confirm that our prioritized compounds selectively activate IRE1/XBP1s signaling without activating other cellular stress-responsive signaling pathways. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our compounds improve ER proteostasis of destabilized …