Digital Commons Network^™

An International Genome-Wide Meta-Analysis Of Primary Biliary Cholangitis: Novel Risk Loci And Candidate Drugs, Heather J. Cordell, James J. Fryett, Kazuko Ueno, Rebecca Darlay, Yoshihiro Aiba, Yuki Hitomi, Minae Kawashima, Nao Nishida, Seik Soon Khor, Olivier Gervais, Yosuke Kawai, Masao Nagasaki, Katsushi Tokunaga, Ruqi Tang, Yongyong Shi, Zhiqiang Li, Brian D. Juran, Elizabeth J. Atkinson, Alessio Gerussi, Marco Carbone, Rosanna Asselta, Angela Cheung, Andrade M De, Aris Baras, Julie Horowitz, Manuel A.R. Ferreira, Dylan Sun, David E. Jones, Steven Flack, Steven Flack

Peninsula Medical School

No abstract provided.

Prospective Cohort Study Assessing The Use Of Peripheral Saphenous Venous Pressure Monitoring As A Marker Of The Transcaval Venous Pressure Gradient In Liver Transplant Surgery, J Fabes, M Spiro, Group Ofp Research

Peninsula Medical School

Abstract Objectives: Assessment of the transcaval venous pressure gradient, the central venous to inferior vena caval pressure, assists anesthetists and surgeons in management of liver transplant recipients. Traditionally, this entails insertion of a femoral central line with increased patient risk and health care cost. Here, we assessed the ability of a saphenous vein cannula to act as a surrogate for the femoral central line as a means to assess the transcaval pressure gradient in a safer and less invasive manner. Materials and Methods: A prospective cohort of 22 patients undergoing liver transplant underwent saphenous vein cannulation in addition to insertion …

Sansevieria: An Evaluation Of Potential Cytotoxic Activity In Reference To Metabolomic And Molecular Docking Studies, Amgad Albohy

Pharmacy

Sansevieria trifasciata Prain. and Sansevieria suffruticosa N.E.Br. were selected to evaluate their cytotoxic activity against colon (CACO2), lung (A-549) and liver (HepG-2) carcinoma cell lines. Results indicated that S. suffruticosa N.E.Br. showed a significant cytotoxic effect on CACO2 with IC50= 30.9 ± 0.72 μg/ml. Evaluating the phenolic and flavonoid contents, S. suffruticosa N.E.Br. has higher total phenolic and flavonoid contents than S. trifasciata Prain. The phenolic content was estimated using HPLC detecting the presence of apigenin-7-glucoside and cinnamic acid only in S. suffruticosa N.E.Br. with p-hydroxybenzoic acid and p-coumaric acid being the major compounds. While, catechin and kaempferol are the …

The Prosperity Gospel And The Church In Africa: A Missiological Assessment In The Light Of The Great Commission, Boubakar Sanou

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Being Needed, Cared For, And Present: Belonging And Disability In The Seventh-Day Adventist Church In North America, Shannon M. Trecartin, Mikelle Wile, Terrance P. Trecartin, Petr Činčala

Faculty Publications

Many Christian churches seek to be places of belonging, yet present barriers to inclusion. The present research focuses on disability and belonging in members of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church in North America. Data from the SDA Global Church Survey (2017–2018) were used to measure attendance, perceived care, and sense of being needed. Results: Differences in attendance, leadership, and “feeling cared for” were observed. The findings of this study suggest that the SDA Church has had both successes and room for growth in terms of creating opportunities for belonging among people with disabilities. Implications for other denominations are also discussed.

Building A Culture Of Trust: An Imperative For Effective School Leadership, Rodney A. Palmer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Seventh-Day Adventists And Abolitionist Petitions, Kevin M. Burton

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Church Schools As Centers Of Influence In The Community: K-12 Education As Evangelism, Scott R. Ward

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Call To Action For Librarians: Countering Conspiracy Theories In The Age Of Qanon, Stephanie Beene, Katie Greer

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Librarians empower learners to become discerning citizens through a set of diverse skills and literacies. To cultivate critical thinkers, librarians continue to build innovative practices, even as technology rapidly evolves. However, the pervasiveness of misinformation and disinformation, most recently seen in the conspiratorial worldviews of QAnon, challenges librarians to center critical thinking in their information literacy praxis. In this article, we provide a concise overview of QAnon and the problems that contemporary internet conspiracy theories like it pose. We offer an epistemological shift for information literacy, from heuristics to mindsets and behaviors, drawing on disciplines external to librarianship. Finally, we …

Sensing Population Distribution From Satellite Imagery Via Deep Learning:Model Selection, Neighboring Effects, And Systematic Biases, Xiao Huang, Di Zhu, Fan Zhang, Tao Liu, Xiao Li, Lei Zou

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The rapid development of remote sensing techniques provides rich, large-coverage, and high-temporal information of the ground, which can be coupled with the emerging deep learning approaches that enable latent features and hidden geographical patterns to be extracted. This article marks the first attempt to cross-compare performances of popular state-of-the-art deep learning models in estimating population distribution from remote sensing images, investigate the contribution of neighboring effect, and explore the potential systematic population estimation biases. We conduct an end-to-end training of four popular deep learning architectures, i.e., VGG, ResNet, Xception, and DenseNet, by establishing a mapping between Sentinel-2 image patches and …

Reducing Energy Demand In China And The United Kingdom: The Importance Of Energy Literacy, D. R.E. Cotton, J. Zhai, W. Miller, L. Dalla Valle, J. Winter

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

As the impacts of climate change become increasingly visible across the globe, awareness of the need for cleaner energy and demand reduction is growing. Energy literacy offers a strong potential for explaining and predicting energy-related behaviours, yet research and policies focused on this topic remain limited. In this study, energy literacy was measured in a sample of 2806 university students in the United Kingdom and China, in addition to their wider environmental attitudes using the New Ecological Paradigm scale. Findings indicate that energy literacy was relatively high overall, but there were significant differences between the knowledge, attitudes and behavioural intentions …

A Novel Multimodal Biometric Authentication System Using Machine Learning And Blockchain, Richard Brown, Gueltoum Bendiab, Stavros Shiaeles, Bogdan Ghita

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Escape Velocity Walks The City: Kindness And Intimacy In Public Space In The Transgender And Gender Diverse Teen Experience, Renée Newman

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Escape Velocity Walks the City took place 23rd-26th October 2019 as part of the Future Echoes Festival in Melbourne, Australia. Created by Rosana Cade with Ivor MacAskill, Laurie Brown and St Martins Youth Theatre, audience and performer walk and talk together through the inner city of Melbourne. Walking and sitting, hand in hand with transgender and gender non-conforming teens, the performance was often silent, uneasy and yet, kind. Simultaneously fragile and powerful the work provoked a gentle expectation to open our hearts and minds. From the surreal zone of isolation (mid COVID-19 pandemic) this paper is a memory of a …

Learning Peace: Adolescent Colombians’ Interpretations Of And Responses To Peace Education Curriculum, Gabriel M. Velez

College of Education Faculty Research and Publications

Young people’s critical role in building peaceful societies has been increasingly recognized in research and policy over the last several decades. This attention has coincided with the development and wider application of peace education in transitional and conflict settings. Within the field, however, there has been less attention to young people’s own perspectives, understandings of their roles, and responses to peace education. This study contributes to this literature and the field of peace education by employing psychological theories on development and meaning making in investigating how adolescents respond to peace education in Colombia. In 2015, the Colombian government mandated the …

Evaluating The Impacts Of Dam Construction And Longshore Transport Upon Modern Sedimentation Within The Rio Grande Delta (Texas, U.S.A.), Samantha Moore, Elizabeth A. Heise, Marty Grove, Anthony Reisinger, Jude A. Benavides

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

The modern Rio Grande delta system has experienced a century of dam construction, water removal for irrigation and municipal use, and land use modifications that have dramatically reduced its sediment load. This study examines whether damming has sufficiently limited delivery of upstream sediment to permit locally eroded sources and/or littoral transport along the coast to influence the provenance signal of the Rio Grande delta. Changes in sediment provenance within the Rio Grande’s delta can be detected and quantified by measurement of detrital zircon Uranium–lead dating age distributions. Previous provenance studies indicate that modern Rio Grande river sand upstream of Falcon …

Identifying Novel Isotopic Tracers Of Marine Primary Producers To Study Food Web Carbon Cycles, Angela Stahl

Open Access Master's Theses

Eukaryotic microalgae play critical roles in global biogeochemical cycling, the efficacy of the biological pump, and the structure and function of most marine food webs. Compound-specific isotope analysis of amino acids (CSIA-AA) couples molecular-level biomarkers with stable isotope analyses to track the contribution of primary producers to food webs. Previous work has developed δ13CAA fingerprints for major groups of primary producers but categorized all marine algae together despite their vast taxonomic and ecological diversity. This work characterizes the δ13CAA fingerprints of four major groups of eukaryotic microalgae — diatoms, dinoflagellates, raphidophytes, and prasinophytes — in controlled cultures, and quantifies the …

Data Dimensionality Reduction Through Cluster Trees And Manifold Learning, Ali Amani

Open Access Master's Theses

Dimensionality reduction algorithms are a commonly used solution to create a visual summary of high dimensional data in a way that makes identification of patterns and trends easier. Algorithms that are used to visualize data as 2 or 3 dimensional plots are popular options, even more so due to clustering and manifold learning. There already exist many tools, both linear and nonlinear, that are used in visualizing high dimensional data, three of the most popular being PCA, t-SNE and UMAP. PCA has low memory requirements and is efficient in low dimensions, t-SNE captures much of the local structure of high …

Is Parent Report Of Bilingual Children's Language Environment As Valid As We Think?, Gabrielle Zeyl

Open Access Master's Theses

Researchers have defined bilingual language proficiency and dominance in different ways for decades; however, to date there is no standard, systematic description used by the scientific community to quantify bilingual children’s language skills. Parent report questionnaires have been regarded as a valid measure of a child’s language skill. The purpose of this study is to explore the validity of parent report of their child’s language use when compared to hand coded audio segments retrieved using the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) System. Additionally, this study explores potential differences in the number of conversational turns and amount of child-directed speech between monolingual …

Interval-Censored Data With Inaccurate Time Bounds And Time-Dependent Covariates, Bing Chen

Open Access Master's Theses

A key characteristic that distinguishes survival analysis from other statistics fields is that survival data are usually censored or incomplete in some way. The event time is interval-censored when the exact event time is unknown and the event occurs within some interval of time.

The purposes of this study included: developed an easy-to-use code for interval-censored survival data with both fixed and time-dependent covariates; conducted extensive simulations to investigate the robustness of the interval-censored survival analysis with inaccurate time bounds and time-dependent covariates, particularly under noninformative censoring and informative censoring; conducted a real data analysis using the ACTG 175 data …

Analysis Of Hysteretic Damping In Axially Loaded Piles, Charlotte Reich

Open Access Master's Theses

The objective of this thesis was to evaluate a simplified quasi-static modeling approach to estimate the hysteretic damping of axially loaded piles for offshore wind jacket structures. The objectives were achieved through analysis and modeling of existing pile load test data at two test sites from the literature. The investigation of axial cyclic load test data involved the analysis of the load-displacement hysteresis loops to quantify the hysteretic damping. The modeling used a static t-z analysis to estimate the hysteretic damping. The measured and modeled damping ratios were compared and it was found that the model underpredicts the measured damping …

Effects Of Modified Schema-Based Instruction On Mathematical Percentage Calculation For Students With Extensive Support Needs In An Ipse Program, Jennifer Anne Graves

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Students with extensive support needs often struggle with the reading comprehension and mathematics reasoning skills needed to approach real life word problems. There has been research completed on appropriate educational pedagogies to utilize with students at the elementary and middle school levels, but none were found discussing methodologies to use for young adults in inclusive post-secondary education programs. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of using modified schema-based instruction on mathematical percentage calculation for students with extensive support needs (i.e., moderate to severe intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, multiple disabilities) in an IPSE program. Upon visual …

To Be Or Not To Be? Trans And Gender-Diverse Identity Negotiation In Caregiving Institutions, Lilith Green

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Prior research on gender diverse caregiving experiences focused mostly on binary transgender perceptions, either treating non-binary people as an afterthought or excluding them altogether. Though non-binary identities are beginning to gain attention in current research, not enough attention has been given to the complex identity processes and discourses that non-binary people must navigate in caregiving encounters. This research sought to bridge that gap in knowledge by comparing and contrasting the ways binary transgender and non-binary people do gender in these encounters. Through 21 in-depth life history interviews, the researcher documented the ways binary transgender and non-binary people adhered to or …

Identifying Potential Funding Inequities For Arkansas Community Colleges, Christopher Allen Heigle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

A 2009 federal call to action seeking to improve postsecondary outcomes was largely underscored by a financial recession that continues to have lasting effects on state funding for public postsecondary education. In an effort to improve efficiency while also growing the number of postsecondary completers, states began adopting performance management policies to help link institutional performance with future funding outcomes. The purpose of this study was to determine if funding outcomes at Arkansas community colleges were related to specific student characteristics of the institution. The researcher hypothesized that there was a significant relationship between an institutions funding outcome and three …

Three Essays On Ceo Narcissism, Ronei Da Silva Leonel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Upper echelons theory focuses on executives as a source of heterogeneity in firms strategic actions and performance, as executives characteristics (e.g. experience, personality, and values) inform the decision-making process, influencing how executives see, perceive and understand environmental stimuli. In recent years, the degree of narcissism CEOs hold has emerged as an important personality trait that can explain how CEOs influence a variety of firm outcomes. Nevertheless, there is a plethora of equivocal findings in which narcissistic CEOs are associated with contrasting outcomes (e.g., positive and negative firm performance, corporate social responsibility and misconduct). In this three-essay dissertation, I draw from …

Difference And Demand: Toward A Levinasian Psychopathology, Edward Anthony Lenzo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation is an attempt to approach psychopathology from a broadly Levinasian perspective. I do so by situating concerns and insights raised by Emmanuel Levinas relative to phenomenological and 4e (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) approaches to psychology, cognitive science, and psychopathology. There has been some recent take-up of Levinas by these approaches, but it has remained somewhat superficial or otherwise inaccurate. It is my position that Levinas concepts of expression as a fundamentally social, ethical, and asymmetric relation, embodiment as sensitive exposure to and enjoyment of the world, and subjectivity as the substitution of ones own existence for the other, …

Charging Of Fine Aerosol Particles, Li Li

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The particle electric charge distribution plays a critical role in electrical mobility measurements of nanoparticle size distribution functions, where it is usually estimated by empirical regression equations. However, there are still lack of methods to accurately calculate nanoparticle-ion collision rates in the presence of strong attractive potentials and to calculate aerosol particle charge distributions with detailed consideration of ion properties. This dissertation consists of three main parts and aims to address the pending issues. The main purpose is to obtain a precise prediction on the aerosol particle charge under various conditions of charging, along with the collision kernel expressions developed …

Using A Person-Centered Approach To Explore Patterns Of Ptsd, Sexual Functioning And Sexual Satisfaction In College Women Exposed To Sexual Violence, Alexandra Lipinski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Elevated symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, impairment in sexual function, and decreased sexual satisfaction are common among female survivors of sexual violence. Although these symptoms frequently co-occur, little is known regarding whether patterns of symptom comorbidity exist across these conditions. The present study identified empirically-derived profiles of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and domains of sexual function and satisfaction among 348 college women who had experienced sexual violence. A four-profile solution was identified. The first profile, Resilient (RES), was characterized by low severity of PTSD and sexual functioning complaints. A second profile, Sexual Distress (SEXDISS), was characterized by greatest endorsement of …

Trainers With Problems Of Professional Competence: Relationships With Trainee Professional Commitment And Self-Efficacy For Addressing Competency Issues, Erica Magsam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This study examined the relationship between perceptions of trainers problems with professional competence (PPC), and the resolution of those competency issues, with trainee professional commitment to mental health professions and self-efficacy for addressing PPC they encounter in others. Data were obtained from 233 trainees enrolled in mental health graduate training programs throughout the United States. The findings indicated trainees who reported higher levels of impact by trainers exhibiting competency issues (including psychological distress) and discomfort addressing trainer PPC endorsed lower professional commitment. Additionally, frustration and disruption due to trainer PPC, discomfort addressing PPC, and need for more information about how …

Multivariate Analysis For Understanding Cognitive Speech Processing, Md Sultan Mahmud

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Categorical perception (CP) of audio is critical to understand how the human brainperceives speech sounds despite widespread variability in acoustic properties. Most studiesthat examine cognitive speech processing have applied methodological approaches that focuson specific or a set of brain regions. Departing from hypothesis-driven approaches, in thisdissertation, we proposed multivariate data-driven approaches to identify the spatiotemporal(i.e., when in time and where in the brain) and spectral (i.e., frequency-band power levels)characteristics of auditory neural activity that reflects CP for speech (i.e., differentiatesphonetic prototypes from ambiguous speech sounds). We recorded 64-channel EEG aslisteners rapidly classified vowel sounds along an acoustic-phonetic continuum. We usedparameter …

Biomolecule Inspired Data Science, Sambriddhi Mainali

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Our ability to generate data has far outdone our ability to analyze it in order to transform it into useful information. A major tool in addressing the problem is extraction or selection of informative features in the data. When the data is structured, dimensionality reduction and analyses can be much easier. However, structured data (beyond just superficial formatting and cleansing) is rare, hopeless in case of images and even text, particularly with DNA sequences. Deep networks resolve these issues to some extent but the question about explainability and timeliness of results still remains. Recent advancements in Genomic Information Systems (GenISs) …