Digital Commons Network^™

A Computer Science Academic Vocabulary List, David Roesler

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis documents the development of the Computer Science Academic Vocabulary List (CSAVL), a pedagogical tool intended for use by English-for-specific-purpose educators and material developers. A 3.5-million-word corpus of academic computer science textbooks and journal articles was developed in order to produce the CSAVL. This study draws on the improved methodologies used in the creation of recent lemma-based word lists such as the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) and the Medical Academic Vocabulary List (MAVL), which take into account the discipline-specific meanings of academic vocabulary. The CSAVL provides specific information for each entry, including part of speech and CS-specific meanings in …

Short- And Long-Term Impacts Of A Deliberative Pedagogy In Introductory Biology And Chemistry Courses, Liz Rain-Griffith

Dissertations and Theses

There have been multiple national calls for curricular reform in college-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), including a need to instill democratic skills in students. Democratic skill building can be embedded in STEM classrooms through intentional "deliberative pedagogies" which include skills in: communication, collaboration, and application. We developed and implemented a deliberative pedagogy, Deliberative Democracy (DD), across introductory majors and non-majors biology courses and a majors chemistry course. In two separate studies, I took a longitudinal, qualitative research approach to understand introductory biology and chemistry students' experiences and perceptions of DD. For the first study, I tracked a cohort …

Effect Of Zinc Treatment On Clinical Outcomes In Patients With Liver Cirrhosis: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis, Huey K. Tan, Adam Streeter, Matthew E. Cramp, Ashwin D. Dhanda

Peninsula Medical School

BACKGROUND Zinc is an essential trace element integral to many cellular and immune functions. Zinc deficiency is highly prevalent in patients with cirrhosis and related to disease severity. AIM To evaluate whether zinc supplementation improves clinical outcomes (disease severity and mortality) in patients with cirrhosis. METHODS This prospectively registered systematic review (PROSPERO reference: CRD42018118219) included all studies in Medline, Embase or Cochrane database with inclusion criteria of adult human studies, comparing zinc supplementation of at least 28 d with standard care or placebo in patients with cirrhosis. Mortality and clinical severity score data were extracted. Random effects meta-analyses compared mortality …

Biologically Important Artificial Light At Night On The Seafloor, Thomas W. Davies, Svenja Tidau, Tim Smyth, David Mckee, James Fishwick

School of Biological and Marine Sciences

No abstract provided.

The Results Of Analysis Of Allium Genus Of Mongolia, Batsukh Buyanchimeg

IGC Proceedings (1977-2023)

No abstract provided.

Investigation The Improvement Operations Affections On Ecological Indexes Of Rangeland Health In Rangelands Of Golestan Province, Iran, Zeid Ahmadi, Mehdi Abedi, Gholam Ali Heshmati

IGC Proceedings (1977-2023)

No abstract provided.

The Monitoring Of Ecological Effect Of Implement Of Sand Control Project In Sand Source Area Round Beijing And Tianjing, Jun Hong, Xujiang Yun, Jie Liu

IGC Proceedings (1977-2023)

No abstract provided.

Medical School Watercooler Newsletter - July 26, 2020, Lindsey Lyle

Watercooler Newsletter

This is the July 26, 2020 edition of the Frederick P. Whiddon College of Medicine's Newsletter - Watercooler.

Contents Include:

Pathologist’s research aims to advance immune-based therapies for treatment of tumors

USA College of Medicine launches Primary Care Pathway Program

College of Medicine, USA Health implement Justice Initiative to fight racism in medicine

Bauer named member of NIH Research Study Section

M1s get first taste of medical school during COVID-19

USA Medical Alumni Association to host virtual CME courses

One For The Ageless, Jerry Zezima

Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop Blog

Age, goes an old (of course) saying, is just a number. As a geezer who flunked math in school and now has the checkbook to prove it, I believe this adage for a number of reasons. I'm not sure how many because I am, you know, bad at math.

Climate Change And Community Health, Parasto Baghae Pour

Climate Change and Public Health Preparedness

No abstract provided.

Comparison Of Non-Nsaid Pain Management In The Treatment Of Patients With Symptomatic Knee Osteoarthritis, Nicholas Schmitz

Theses and Graduate Projects

Objective To compare the efficacy of other modalities and interventions versus standard first-line therapy of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for pain management in patients with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis

Methods Perform literature reviews outlining patients suffering from Grade II or higher KOA using the Kellgren-Lawrence classification system and currently experiencing symptoms of pain, stiffness, and impaired physical functioning. Use data and results from various studies to compare improvement of symptoms from these modalities versus improvement of NSAIDs alone.

Results Weight loss and physical activity should remain the mainstay of early osteoarthritis treatment to help slow disease progression and symptoms of KOA. Duloxetine …

Comparison Of Non-Nsaid Pain Management In The Treatment Of Patients With Symptomatic Knee Osteoarthritis, Nicholas Schmitz

Theses and Graduate Projects

Objective: To compare the efficacy of other modalities and interventions versus standard first-line therapy of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for pain management in patients with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis

Methods: Perform literature reviews outlining patients suffering from Grade II or higher KOA using the Kellgren-Lawrence classification system and currently experiencing symptoms of pain, stiffness, and impaired physical functioning. Use data and results from various studies to compare improvement of symptoms from these modalities versus improvement of NSAIDs alone.

Results: Weight loss and physical activity should remain the mainstay of early osteoarthritis treatment to help slow disease progression and symptoms of KOA. Duloxetine …

Renal Survival In Children With Glomerulonephritis With Crescents: A Pediatric Nephrology Research Consortium Cohort Study, Joseph G. Maliakkal, M. John Hicks, Mini Michael, David T. Selewski, Katherine Twombley, Michelle N. Rheault, Meredith Seamon, Jason M. Misurac, Cheryl L. Tran, Loretta Reyes, Joseph T. Flynn, Ali M. Onder, Alexandru R. Constantinescu, Vaishali Singh, Cynthia Pan, Abiodun Aderogba Omoloja, Qiang Wu, William E. Smoyer, Guillermo Hidalgo, Scott E. Wenderfer

Pediatrics Faculty Publications

There is no evidence-based definition for diagnosing crescentic glomerulonephritis. The prognostic implications of crescentic lesions on kidney biopsy have not been quantified. Our objective was to determine risk factors for end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) in patients with glomerulonephritis and crescents on kidney biopsy. A query of the Pediatric Nephrology Research Consortium’s Pediatric Glomerulonephritis with Crescents registry identified 305 patients from 15 centers. A retrospective cohort study was performed with ESKD as the primary outcome. Median age at biopsy was 11 years (range 1–21). The percentage of crescents was 3–100% (median 20%). Etiologies included IgA nephropathy (23%), lupus (21%), IgA vasculitis …

Cultivating Healthy Schools: The Feasibility Of An Outdoor Classroom In A Public Elementary School, Erin Largo-Wight, Caroline A. Guardino, Katrina W. Hall

Florida Public Health Review

Background: Nature contact and time outdoors is critical for healthy child development and well-being and a disconnect from nature may be problematic. Purpose: This study was designed to evaluate the feasibility of a nature contact intervention for children – an outdoor classroom - in a public school. Methods: Two kindergarten classes participated in this mixed-methods case study (N=2 teachers, n=36 children aged 5-6) and used an outdoor classroom every other day for language arts lesson over a six weeks observation period. The two teachers in this case study completed a survey that assessed perceived practicality and feasibility of using the …

African Refugee Women In Egypt: Lacunae In International Refugee Law And The Erasure Of Disadvantaged Groups, Wigdan Mohamad

Theses and Dissertations

Migration is not a recent phenomenon. From the first humans, to people all around the globe today, leave their homes in search of a better life. Since February 2020, Egypt, an attractive destination due to its strategic geolocation, homes the “fifth largest urban refugee population in the world ”. Persecution, political instability, climate degradation, protracted conflicts, unrest, and new wars throughout Africa and Middle Eastern region has caused a dramatic rise of refugees, many of whom make their way to Egypt with the hopes of finding refuge. Egypt hosts a diverse community of refugees, asylum-seekers, and failed asylum-seekers from 58 …

Effect Of Dilution On Sedimentational Separation Of Bacteria From Blood, Clifton M. Anderson, William G. Pitt

Faculty Publications

Bacteria must be separated from septic whole blood in preparation for rapid antibiotic susceptibility tests. This work improves upon past work isolating bacteria from whole blood by exploring an important experimental factor: Whole blood dilution. Herein, we use the continuity equation to model red blood cell sedimentation and show that overall spinning time decreases as the blood is diluted. We found that the bacteria can also be captured more efficiently from diluted blood, up to approximately 68 ± 8% recovery (95% confidence interval). However, diluting blood both requires and creates extra fluid that end users must handle; an optimal dilution, …

The Anti-Diabetic Potential Of The African Adansonia Digitata L. Plant Extract, Marwa Tawfik Badawy

Theses and Dissertations

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a severe chronic disease affecting a large population worldwide. The Middle Eastern region has been gifted with lots of native medicinal plants. However, there is less information on development of these medicinal plants into nutraceuticals for modulating specific diseases such as diabetes of common occurrence regionally. Towards this end, there is a crucial need to investigate other types of treatments to modulate diabetes. This study is conducted to fill in this gap by investigating medicinal plant used as folk medicine, which is Baobab (Adansonia digitata L.). This study is performed in two phases: in-vitro and in-vivo. …

Changes Of Residue Function And Signaling Regrowth After Forage Cutting, Huimin Yang, Linag Zhao, Yuying Shen, Xiaoyan Zhang

IGC Proceedings (1977-2023)

No abstract provided.

Observation On The Pollen Morphology Of 5 Species Of Caragana Fabr. Plants In The Alashan Desert, Tao Wan, Ping Cai, Weidong Yi, Xiaoming Zhang, Chenbo Zhang

IGC Proceedings (1977-2023)

No abstract provided.

Rangeland Availability, Use Of The Flora And Land Ownership In El Toro Gorge (Rosario De Lerma Department, Salta Province, Argentina), Francisco Ramón Barbarón

IGC Proceedings (1977-2023)

No abstract provided.

Alternate Warfare: The Unseen Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Elyse Keener

Liberty University Journal of Statesmanship & Public Policy

Biological warfare is a national security concern that transcends centuries. In the current international climate, biowarfare is of particular interest due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This article seeks to follow historical cases of biological warfare and international response to these cases in order to understand the implications of COVID-19, if it were to be weaponized. Also covered is the current capabilities that Russia, China, and Iran are assessed to possess.

Statement Of World Aquatic Scientific Societies On The Need To Take Urgent Action Against Human-Caused Climate Change, Based On Scientific Evidence [Dear Colleague Letter], Scott A. Bonar, Brian R. Murphy, Leanne H. Roulson, Jesse T. Trushenski, Douglas J. Austen, Michael Edward Douglas

United States Fish and Wildlife Service: Publications

Dear Colleague Letter from the American Fisheries Society to fellow scientific societies, July 25, 2020, about the urgent need for responsive collective action to mitigate impending radical climate change. Includes the Statement of World Aquatic Scientific Societies on the Need to Take Urgent Action Against Human-Caused Climate Change, Based on Scientific Evidence, emphasizing the importance of aquatic ecosystems. Includes extensive citations and notes.

"Water is the most important natural resource on Earth as it is vital for life. Aquatic ecosystems, freshwater or marine, provide multiple benefits to human society, such as provisioning of oxygen, food, drinking water, genetic resources; regulation …

Bayesian Analysis Of Single Molecule Fluorescence Microscopy Data, Mohamadreza Fazel

Physics & Astronomy ETDs

The diffraction limit can be circumvent by creating and exploiting independent behaviors of the sample at lengths scale below the diffraction limit. In fluorescence microscopy, the independence arises from individual fluorescent labels switching between dark and fluorescence states. The fluorophores can then be localized employing the generated sparse image frames. Finally, the resulting list of coordinates is utilized to generate high resolution images or to gain quantitative insight into the underlying biological structures. Therefore image processing and post-processing are essential stages of SMLM techniques.

In this dissertation, Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo was employed to implement Bayesian analysis of …

Transcriptional Profiling Reveals Altered Biological Characteristics Of Chorionic Stem Cells From Women With Gestational Diabetes, Liyun Chen, Chung-Teng Wang, Nicholas R Forsyth, Pensee Wu

Open Access Publications

BACKGROUND: Gestational diabetes (GDM) is a common complication of pregnancy. The impact of pregnancy complications on placental function suggests that extraembryonic stem cells in the placenta may also be affected during pregnancy. Neonatal tissue-derived stem cells, with the advantages of their differentiation capacity and non-invasive isolation processes, have been proposed as a promising therapeutic avenue for GDM management through potential cell therapy approaches. However, the influence of GDM on autologous stem cells remains unclear. Thus, studies that provide comprehensive understanding of stem cells isolated from women with GDM are essential to guide future clinical applications.

METHODS: Human chorionic membrane-derived stem …

Causal Mutations From Adaptive Laboratory Evolution Are Outlined By Multiple Scales Of Genome Annotations And Condition-Specificity., Patrick V Phaneuf, James T Yurkovich, David Heckmann, Muyao Wu, Troy E Sandberg, Zachary A King, Justin Tan, Bernhard O Palsson, Adam M Feist

Articles, Abstracts, and Reports

BACKGROUND: Adaptive Laboratory Evolution (ALE) has emerged as an experimental approach to discover mutations that confer phenotypic functions of interest. However, the task of finding and understanding all beneficial mutations of an ALE experiment remains an open challenge for the field. To provide for better results than traditional methods of ALE mutation analysis, this work applied enrichment methods to mutations described by a multiscale annotation framework and a consolidated set of ALE experiment conditions. A total of 25,321 unique genome annotations from various sources were leveraged to describe multiple scales of mutated features in a set of 35 Escherichia coli …

Answering Schrödinger's "What Is Life?", Stuart Kauffman

Articles, Abstracts, and Reports

In his "What Is Life?" Schrödinger poses three questions: (1) What is the source of order in organisms? (2) How do organisms remain ordered in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (3) Are new laws of physics required? He answers his first question with his famous "aperiodic solid". He leaves his second and third questions unanswered. I try to show that his first answer is also the answer to his second question. Aperiodic solids such as protein enzymes are "boundary conditions" that constrain the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom in non-equilibrium processes such that …

Long-Term Safety And Tolerability Of Apremilast Versus Placebo In Psoriatic Arthritis: A Pooled Safety Analysis Of Three Phase Iii, Randomized, Controlled Trials., Philip Mease, Dafna D Gladman, Juan J Gomez-Reino, Stephen Hall, Arthur Kavanaugh, Eric Lespessailles, Georg Schett, Maria Paris, Nikolay Delev, Lichen Teng, Jürgen Wollenhaupt

Articles, Abstracts, and Reports

OBJECTIVE: Psoriatic arthritis (PsA) requires long-term treatment, yet safety concerns and monitoring requirements make maintenance a challenge. This analysis of pooled Psoriatic Arthritis Long-term Assessment of Clinical Efficacy (PALACE) 1, 2, and 3 data describes 3-year apremilast safety and tolerability in PsA.

METHODS: Patients with active PsA were randomized (1:1:1) to placebo, apremilast 30 mg twice daily, or apremilast 20 mg twice daily. Placebo patients were re-randomized to apremilast 30 mg twice daily or 20 mg twice daily at week 16 (early escape) or 24. Double-blind treatment continued to week 52; patients could continue apremilast during an open-label, long-term treatment …

Children In 2077: Designing Children’S Technologies In The Age Of Transhumanism, Oğuz Oz Buruk, Oğuzhan Özcan, Gökçe Elif Baykal, Tilbe Göksun, Selçuk Acar, Güler Akduman, Mehmet Aydın Baytaş, Ceylan Beşevli, Joe Best, Aykut Coşkun, Hüseyin Uğur Genç, Baki Kocaballi, Samuli Laato, Cássia Mota, Konstantinos Papangelis, Marigo Raftopoulos, Richard Ramchurn, Juan Sádaba, Mattia Thibault, Annika Wolff, Mert Yıldız

Presentations and other scholarship

What for and how will we design children’s technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children’s lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies can clearly be defined as transhumanist, such as under-skin chips or …

Assessing The Effect Of Interventions For Axial Spondyloarthritis According To The Endorsed Asas/Omeract Core Outcome Set: A Meta-Research Study Of Trials Included In Cochrane Reviews., Rikke A Andreasen, Lars E Kristensen, Xenofon Baraliakos, Vibeke Strand, Philip Mease, Maarten De Wit, Torkell Ellingsen, Inger Marie J Hansen, Jamie Kirkham, George A Wells, Peter Tugwell, Lara Maxwell, Maarten Boers, Kenneth Egstrup, Robin Christensen

Articles, Abstracts, and Reports

The Assessment of SpondyloArthritis international Society (ASAS) has defined core sets for (i) symptom-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (SM-ARD), (ii) clinical record keeping, and (iii) disease-controlling anti-rheumatic therapy (DC-ART). These include the following domains for all three core sets: "physical function," "pain," "spinal mobility," "spinal stiffness," and "patient's global assessment" (PGA). The core set for clinical record keeping further includes the domains "peripheral joints/entheses" and "acute phase reactants," and the core set for DC-ART further includes the domains "fatigue" and "spine radiographs/hip radiographs." The Outcome Measures in Rheumatology (OMERACT) endorsed the core sets in 1998.Using empirical evidence from axSpA trials, we investigated …

Virtual Studyusa Program Helps Connect Students With Industry Leaders, Pam Starling

University of Mississippi News

Online info session scheduled July 30 for UM faculty to explore new opportunities