Digital Commons Network^™

System Of Structural Dependency In The Sudanese Refugee Women Of Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, Jessica Gladden

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Many countries facing an influx of refugees have established refugee camps to provide temporary housing. Lacking a solution for the refugee crisis, these temporary facilities become long-term housing for many refugees. As a result, many refugees spend years or even decades in refugee camps. The refugees often are legally prohibited from obtaining employment. They must rely on aid from the United Nations and other organizations for their survival. This study considers some of the impacts of living in a refugee camp and surviving solely on humanitarian aid. In particular, this study examines the structural dependency observed in the Sudanese refugee …

The Social Construction Of Arab Identity In The U.S.: The Historical Complicity And The Modern Responsibility Of Social Work, Suhad Tabahi, Jacob Bucher

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper presents the sociopolitical experiences of early Arab migrants in the United States (U.S.) and the process of contradictory and socially constructed racial categorizations favoring white supremacy. While there is much discourse of the racial formation of Arab immigrants since 9-11, the actual racial project started in the early twentieth century, through varies entities including the social work profession where the “othering” process of early Arabs Americans existed in social welfare practice. Examples of the pejorative attitudes towards Arab immigrants from the early social work discourse are examined through proceedings from the National Conference on Social Welfare (NCSW) in …

School Lunch Participation And Youth School Failure: A Multi-Racial Perspective, Shiyou Wu, Kalah M. Villagrana, Siobhan M. Lawler, Renee Garbe

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

In the United States, students from low-socioeconomic status and minority ethnic groups graduate from high school at lower rates than their peers. Limited studies exist about the risk and protective factors that affect the disproportionate graduation rates by income and ethnicity. Using the 2016 Arizona Youth Survey data (N = 32,178), this study aims to explore the relationship between the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) participation and school failure, and other risk and protective factors from a multi-racial perspective. Logistic regressions were conducted on the total sample and the six ethnic subsamples (i.e., White, Latino, Black, American Indian, Asian/Pacific Islander, …

Identifying And Assisting Human Trafficking Survivors: A Post-Training Analysis Of First Responders, Sarah Erwin, Jessie Peter, Rochelle L. Dalla Dr., Virginia Chaidez, Amy Encinger, Lee Kreimer

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

First responders and the agencies for which they work face numerous challenges in identifying and assisting human trafficking survivors. This article aims to outline the ways in which first responders in a Midwestern state identify and provide services to human trafficking survivors. Six months after attending a two-day training aimed at recognizing and assisting human trafficking survivors, first responders were invited to participate in a follow-up survey regarding the training that they received. Responses were collected from 270 participants who work at various government, medical, or social service agencies in both rural and urban service areas across the state. Results …

Journal Of Sociology And Social Welfare Vol. 47, Issue 4

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

No abstract provided.

Speech Inequality After Janus V. Afscme, Charlotte Garden

Faculty Articles

This Article explores the growing divide between the Roberts Court’s treatment of the free speech rights of wealthy individuals and corporations in campaign finance cases as compared to its treatment of the rights of public-sector labor unions and their members. First, it highlights some internal contradictions in the Janus Court’s analysis. Then, it discusses the growing—yet mostly ignored—divergence in the Court’s treatment of corporate and labor speakers with respect to the use of market influence to achieve political influence.The Article has two Parts. In Part I, I explain how the Court reached its decision in Janus before critiquing the decision’s …

Antitrust And Two-Sided Platforms: The Failure Of American Express, John B. Kirkwood

Faculty Articles

Two-sided platforms serve two sets of customers and enable them to interact with each other. The five most valuable corporations in America – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft – all operate two-sided platforms. But despite their growing power, the Supreme Court's American Express decision has made it harder to stop them from stifling competition. This Article systematically exposes the flaws in the Court's reasoning and identifies the principles that should govern future cases. The Court’s most fundamental error was to require plaintiffs in rule of reason cases to make an initial showing of consumer harm that weighs the effects …

Neurodegenerative Modeling: Tau Protein, Degradative Pathways, And Gene Expression Profiling Of Human Ipsc-Derived Neural Precursors And Differentiated 3-D Neural Sphere Versus 2-D Monolayer Cultures, Kyle H. Anthoney

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Human induced pluripotent stem cells offer a model for human brain development and disease by differentiation into brain organoids; however, current neural culture systems lack the microenvironment, neuronal circuits and connectivity, vascular circulation, and immune system that exist in vivo. After differentiation and development of neuronal and non-neuronal cell types within two formats of cell cultures, we can visualize and recapitulate in vivo protein accumulation, gene expression, and degradative processes such as autophagy. Using RNA extraction, purification methods and reverse transcription I compared traditional monolayer cultures and novel 3-D neural sphere cultures via gene expression analysis. This analysis indicated …

Bulletin 2020-2021, Seattle University School Of Law

Viewbooks

No abstract provided.

Strategies For Increasing Employee Productivity In Small Technology Consulting Businesses, Dalinda Yvonne Milne

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Unproductive employees in technology consulting small businesses negatively affect organizational output and profits. Investing in employee productivity is beneficial to ensuring an organization’s ability to improve their profits and sustainability as business leaders have an influential role in identifying and addressing the root causes of employee productivity issues in their organizations. The conceptual framework that grounded this doctoral study was Thomas Gilbert’s behavioral engineering model. The participants in this study consisted of 8 leaders in a Texas technology consulting small business with experience in increasing employee productivity. Data were collected through in-person semistructured interviews and business documents. Methodological triangulation was …

Perceptions Of Teachers' Regarding Barriers To Using Instructional Technology In Egyptian Schools, Radwa El Shafei

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The local K-12 school problem addressed in this study was teachers' underutilization of instructional technology (IT) to improve teaching and student learning. The purpose of this study was to explore teachers' current use of IT, as well as their perceptions of barriers to using IT in classrooms. The technology acceptance model guided the study by emphasizing the importance of perceived ease of use, usefulness, and attitudes in understanding teachers' perceptions about integrating IT. The research questions focused on teachers' perceptions of their knowledge of how to use IT, barriers to using IT and how it is currently implemented. Using a …

The Need For A Balanced System And More Community-Based Programs And Interventions In Juvenile Justice Reform In Georgia, Ebony R. Bullock

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The research problem that this study addressed was the rising juvenile crime in Fulton County, Georgia. Georgia’s juvenile justice system went through a significant overhaul in 2013 that promised to reduce juvenile crime and recidivism, create more community-based interventions and programs, reduce the number of juveniles in out-of-home placement, and save taxpayers money. Despite the efforts put into place by House Bill 242 of 2013 (HB242), there was still an increase in juvenile crime, and there were not many community-based interventions and programs put into place. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of HB242 on juvenile …

Sustainability Strategies Of Small Business Owners In Northcentral Texas, Danielson Ledum Dukor

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

While small businesses contribute significantly to job creation in the United States, they fail financially at alarming rates. Fifty percent of small businesses survive 5 years or longer, and only one-third of small business startups survive more than 10 years. Owners of small businesses could benefit from strategies used to mitigate the small firms’ failure rate by obtaining suitable leadership values and skills, understanding the business’s nature, and engaging in financial planning. Grounded in Schumpeter’s entrepreneurship theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies small home health business owners used to sustain their businesses beyond …

Targeted Bisulfite Pyrosequencing & Amplicon Bisulfite Sequencing Epigenetic Analysis, Charles Tran, Lin Xie, Min Zhao, Edwin Jcg Van Den Oord

UROP Posters

Targeted Bisulfite Pyrosequencing & Amplicon Bisulfite Sequencing Epigenetic Analysis

Charles Tran, Dept. of Biology, with Dr. Karolina Aberg, VCU School of Pharmacy

Background: The Great Smoky Mountain Study is a longitudinal study that started in 1992 and includes 1,420 participants that were 9 to 13 years at intake and have since been revisited ~ every 2 years. Participants (and their parents) provided detailed assessment of stressors and health outcomes as well as blood samples at each interview. In a recent methylome-wide association study the samples were used to identify methylation marks associated with childhood trauma. In the current work, we …

Economical Custom-Made 3d Bioprinter, Lucas Craft

UROP Posters

Economical Custom-Made 3D BioPrinter

Lucas Craft, Depts. of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Physics, with Dr. Daeha Joung, Dept. of Physics

Bioprinters are used to extrude biomaterials that contain living cells to develop synthetic organ and tissue models. Being able to 3D bioprint these models allows us to build the small intricate structures that mimic complicated living organs. As of now, the technology is expensive, with the average bioprinter exceeding ten thousand dollars. The high price often makes this tool a high-risk investment for many biomedical companies and researchers who may want to use this technology for research. Fortunately, the …

The Case For Empowering Quality Shareholders, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Abstract Anyone can buy stock in a public company, but not all shareholders are equally committed to a company’s long-term success. In an increasingly fragmented financial world, shareholders’ attitudes toward the companies in which they invest vary widely, from time horizon to conviction. Faced with indexers, short-term traders, and activists, it is more important than ever for businesses to ensure that their shareholders are dedicated to their missions. Today’s companies need “quality shareholders,” as Warren Buffett called those who “load up and stick around,” or buy large stakes and hold for long periods. While scholars in recent years have extensively …

Fusion-Net: Integration Of Dimension Reduction And Deep Learning Neural Network For Image Classification, Mohammad Masum, Philippe Laval

Published and Grey Literature from PhD Candidates

Building a deep network using original digital images requires learning many parameters which may reduce the accuracy rates. The images can be compressed by using dimension reduction methods and extracted reduced features can be feeding into a deep network for classification. Hence, in the training phase of the network, the number of parameters will be decreased. Principal Component Analysis is a well-known dimension reduction technique that leverage orthogonal linear transformation of the original data. In this paper, we propose a neural network-based framework, named Fusion-Net, which implements PCA on an image dataset (CIFAR-10) and then a neural network applies on …

Can Model Checking Assure, Distributed Autonomous Systems Agree? An Urban Air Mobility Case Study, Anubhav Gupta, Siddhartha Bhattacharyya, S. Vadivel

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

—Advancement in artificial intelligence, internet of things and information technology have enabled the delegation of execution of autonomous services to autonomous systems for civil applications. It is envisioned, that with an increase in the demand for autonomous systems, the decision making associated in the execution of the autonomous services will be distributed, with some of the responsibility in decision making, shifted to the autonomous systems. Thus, it is of utmost importance that we assure the correctness of distributed protocols, that multiple autonomous systems will follow, as they interact with each other in providing the service. Towards this end, we discuss …

Time Series Analysis Of Water Use And Indirect Reusewithin A Huc-4 Basin (Wabash) Over A Nine Year Period, M. Julia Wiener, Sebastian Moreno, Chad T. Jafvert, Loring F. Nies

Lyles School of Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

Anthropogenic water use and reuse represent major components of the water cycle. In the context of climate change, water reuse and recycling are considered necessary components for an integrated water management approach. Unplanned, or de facto, indirect water reuse occurs in most of the U.S. river systems, however, there is little real-time documentation of it. Despite the fact that there are national and state agencies that systematically collect data on water withdrawals and wastewater discharges, their databases are organized and managed in a way that makes it challenging to use them for water resource management analysis. The ability to combine …

Alone, Now, Alexandra Sophia Terlesky

Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Survey Of Radiologists At Lvhn On Iv Contrast Reactions And Usage, Cyrus Farazmand, Bret Kricun Md

USF-LVHN SELECT

No abstract provided.

A Prospective, Rct To Compare Vestibular Incision Supraperiosteal Access And Sulcular Tunnel Access Root Coverage Procedures To Treat Gingival Recession. A Pilot Study, Jamie Hargett Howard

All ETDs from UAB

The objective of this study was to evaluate the clinical and patient centered outcomes obtained following soft tissue grafting utilizing vestibular incision subperiosteal tunneling access (VISTA) or standard tunneling access (STA) procedures with acellular dermal matrix (ADM) and coronal flap advancement to treat Miller class I and II recession defects on single rooted teeth. Nine patients and 29 recession defects were randomly divided into two groups (A: VISTA, B: STA) and were treated and evaluated for six months post-surgically. For all participants included in the study the average recession defects at baseline were 2.48±0.57mm and at the six-month visit the …

Use Of Lc-Qtof-Ms For Determining The Presence Of Illicit Substances In Urine, Rebecca Howell

All ETDs from UAB

Confirmation testing for drug screens has most commonly been conducted using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), but the use of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) methods has been gaining popularity in recent years. This can be attributed to several advantages that LC-MS has over GC-MS including the ability to detect non-volatile, thermolabile and polar compounds. Additionally, most compounds can be analyzed without any previous derivatization steps, meaning that sample prepara-tion is simpler, cheaper and faster. The method used for this study consisted of using a nano-LC-electrospray ionization (ESI) system in conjunction with a hybrid Quadrupole OrthogonalTime-of-Flight mass spectrometer (QTOF-MS), which yields high …

Effect Of Cement Selection On Retention Of Zirconia And Lithium Disilicate Crowns, Chan-Te Huang

All ETDs from UAB

Background: Ceramic crowns (lithium disilicate and zirconia) have become the most prescribed material for the restoration of anterior and posterior teeth due to the esthetic concerns of patients and the high cost of noble alloys. Different types of cements are used for luting crowns such as zinc phosphate, glass ionomer, resin modified glass ionomer (RMGI), resin cements and bioactive cements. Selection of different cements and bonding protocols for zirconia or lithium disilicate crowns to increase their bonding strength remains a clinical challenge for dentists. Objectives: To measure the retention strength of lithium disilicate and zirconia crowns cemented with different cements. …

In Vitro Evaluation Of Candida Albicans Adherence And Disinfection Techniques On Cad/Cam Milled, 3d Printed, And Heat-Cured Pmma, Mohammad Amir Koujan

All ETDs from UAB

INTRODUCTION: Candida albicans has been regarded as the most predominant oral fungal pathogen and the main causative of denture stomatitis. Modern denture are fabricated from various types of polymers commonly: CAD/CAM or heat-cured. C. albicans adherence rate to these polymers and disinfection efficacy of adherent fungal biofilms are multifactorial processes and differ depending on the physical characteristics of the targeted surface. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate Candida albicans adherence to specimens from three types of polymers namely: heat-cured PMMA, CAD/CAM milled and 3D printed. The second part compares the efficacy of four common disinfection techniques on …

Exploring Diet Quality In Early Care And Education Centers: Measures, Policies, And Center Characteristics, Elizabeth Kroeger

All ETDs from UAB

Over 65% of children ages 2-5 years attend Early Care and Education (ECE) centers where they consume most of their daily caloric intake; however, children at these centers are not meeting the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). This could suggest poor diet quality, which is a risk factor for diet-related diseases. Currently, diet quality in ECE centers is measured through the assessment of either the food/beverages listed on the lunch menu (menu), served to the children during lunch (served), or consumed by the children during lunch (consumed). However, the lunch meal may be better viewed as a process, rather than …

Facial Recognition With Image Signaling: Efficacy Of Two Factor Authentication Utilizing A Single Image Input Mechanism On A Smartphone, Jaret Langston

All ETDs from UAB

Society generates 2.8 quintillion bytes of new data every day. Much of this data is sensitive information that should be protected from unauthorized access. Sensitive information is defined as information that, if compromised or misused, could adversely affect the privacy of the individual or organization. There are many types of information that fit this definition and places it is found, but for this discussion we will focus on: • Personally Identifiable Information (PII) (e.g., birth date, social security number, driver’s license number, passport number). • Medical information (e.g., insurance policy numbers, prescriptions, history). • Consumer information (e.g., credit card, banking, …

Psychosocial And Physiological Correlates Of Chronic Pain In Persons Living With Hiv, Michael Owens

All ETDs from UAB

Due to recent advancements in antiretroviral therapy (ART), people living with HIV (PLWH) who respond well and remain adherent to their medication regimens are achieving “near normal” life expectancies. As a result, HIV is no longer considered a death sentence, but rather a chronic health condition to be managed. However, the longer a person lives with the virus, the more prone to HIV-associated chronic diseases he or she becomes. One particularly important health condition with the potential to significantly and negatively impact quality of life is chronic pain. The prevalence rates of chronic pain in PLWH are estimated to be …

When It Breaks Us, Tabitha Palmer

All ETDs from UAB

Twins, Evie and Mel, lost their mother before their senior year of high school. The girls’ father deploys overseas to escape his grief, leaving them with an aunt they barely know to go through this painful grieving process alone in a new town. They are in constant conflict with each other due to how they cope with this unexpected upturn of their lives. Evie choses to remain optimistic, believing she will get through this and things will turn out for the better. While Mel choses to close herself off from her family, turning instead to a pen pal to maintain …

Neural Networks For Threshold Dynamics Reconstruction, Elisa Negrini, Almanzo Jiahe Gao, Abigail Bowering, Wei Zhu, Luca Capogna

Mathematics Sciences: Faculty Publications

We introduce two convolutional neural network (CNN) architec- tures, inspired by the Merriman-Bence-Osher (MBO) algorithm and by cellular automatons, to model and learn threshold dynamics for front evolution from video data. The first model, termed the (single-dynamics) MBO network, learns a specific kernel and threshold for each input video without adapting to new dynamics, while the second, a meta-learning MBO network, generalizes across diverse threshold dynamics by adapting its parameters per input. Both models are evaluated on synthetic and real-world videos (ice melting and fire front propagation), with performance metrics indicating effective reconstruction and extrapolation of evolving boundaries, even under …