Digital Commons Network^™

Benzodiazepine Use And Dependence In Relation To Chronic Pain Intensity And Pain Catastrophizing, Emma Carnes Lape

Theses - ALL

Benzodiazepines (BZDs), a class of sedative-hypnotic drugs, are at the center of an emerging prescription drug crisis. From approximately 1995-2015, overdose deaths involving BZDs quadrupled and average dose equivalents more than tripled. Specific concern has centered on elevated rates of BZD use among individuals with chronic pain, given that BZDs are generally not indicated for pain management. Consistent with negative reinforcement and motivational models of substance use, desire for pain alleviation may be a salient motivator of BZD use, particularly as individuals commonly report using BZDs for negative affect alleviation. The present study tested cross-sectional associations between pain intensity and …

Alaska's Digital Archives: Creating A Record For An Online Object, Arlene B. Schmuland

Archives

Instructions on how to add an online object (i.e. URL) as an item within the Alaska's Digital Archives site.

Development Of A Scale To Measure Nursing Presence, Carol Toliuszis Kostovich

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to develop a scale designed to measure nursing presence and to subsequently examine the psychometric properties of the scale; to describe patients' perceptions of nursing presence; and to evaluate the relationship between nursing presence and patient satisfaction. A conceptual definition of nursing presence was operationalized into the 25-item Presence of Nursing Scale (PONS). The sample consisted of 330 acutely ill medical-surgical adult patients hospitalized in a Midwestern community hospital. Using a 5-point Likert scale, patients were asked to rate the frequency that the registered nurse displayed these 25 characteristics of nursing presence. Content validity …

North Korea's Policy Toward The United States: Rappochement To Confrontational Diplomacy In The 1970s And The 1990s, Seongryeol Kim

Dissertations - ALL

This research project challenges the common belief that North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons and their related delivery systems in the 1990s was a fundamental shift in its foreign policy objectives toward the United States. It argues instead that North Korea has continued to pursue the rapprochement policy announced by Kim Il Sung in the early 1970s. Its findings demonstrate that the shift from rapprochement in the 1970s to provocation in the 1990s was a tactical rather than a strategic change in North Korea's foreign policy. The U.S.'s indifference to the acute security anxieties caused by exogenous factors associated with …

A Tale Of Three Resources: The Influence Of Multiple Resources On Plant-Herbivore Interactions, Neha Mohan Babu

Dissertations - ALL

Although studies indicate that plant growth can be co-limited by multiple resources, particularly water, nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P), the role of co-limiting resources in driving plant-herbivore interactions remains poorly understood. Evidence indicates that the resources that limit plant and herbivore growth may differ which likely influences trophic interactions. In this dissertation, I explored how multiple resource limitation of plants affects herbivore abundance, herbivore impact on plant biomass, and plant traits, using both theoretical and empirical methods. As none of the existing hypotheses account for the effects of multiple resource limitation, I developed a novel theoretical model to predict the …

A Portrait Of Postsecondary Stem Teaching: Examining The Roles Of Organizational Climate And Professional Identity, Sule Aksoy

Dissertations - ALL

Many empirical studies on the factors associated with the use of evidence-based instructional practices have examined the individual and contextual characteristics. However, little attention has been afforded to the role of context and practice on teacher identity. This dissertation consists of three-article style papers that examine the relationship between contextual factors, teacher identity, and instructional practices to fill this gap in the literature. Chapter 1 provides a deep understanding of organizational climate in STEM departments concerning teaching practices. Significant differences in organizational factors such as leadership, resources, and respect for teaching were found between graduate instructors and the faculty. Similarly, …

Buckling Patterns And Mechanics Of Thin Interfacial Polymer Films, Monica M. Ripp

Dissertations - ALL

Thin elastic solids are easily deformed and will readily collapse into complex buckling modes. They can also transition between distinct buckling modes when the confining forces evolve over time, forming a variety of robust and striking patterns. Here we explore how thin interfacial films and the buckling modes they present couple with evolving macroscopic forces and how multi-scale features of the systems give rise to patterns.

In the indentation of a circular film floating on a liquid bath three buckling modes arise: wrinkling, crumpling, and folding. This work shows that striking transitions between these states accompany four regimes in the …

Exploration Of Carbon-Oxygen And Carbon-Nitrogen Bond Formation Utilizing Trichloroacetimidates And Investigations Of New Reactions Mediated By Oxoammonium Salts, Rowan Meador

Dissertations - ALL

Mono-O-alkylated 1,1′-bi-2-naphthols (BINOLs) are often used as the source of chirality for catalysts or ligand systems that are employed in asymmetric organic transformations. However, these BINOLs can be hard to synthesize. The O-alkylation of BINOL can be accomplished with primary and secondary alkyl halides or under Mitsunobu conditions, the yields of these alkylations with tertiary halides or alcohols are very low. A new protocol was developed utilizing trichloroacetamide electrophiles to install bulky groups onto one of the phenolic oxygens. Trichloroacetimidates are also shown to be useful reactions for the synthesis of esters. These reagents proceeded through a symbiotic activation pathway. …

The Poverty Of Simplicity: Austerity, Alienation, And Tiny Houses, Brian Richard Hennigan

Dissertations - ALL

Tiny houses – stand-alone, fully functional dwellings generally between 100 and 400 square-feet – are increasingly popular in the United States. The degradation of working class life wrought through neoliberal policy and then punctuated by the Great Recession propels this popularity. Next to traditional houses, tiny houses are significantly cheaper. Those among the middle stratum of the working class have sought out tiny houses as a means to ease their financial anxiety. Rather than merely a newer form of cheaper housing, an entire lifestyle movement has emerged around tiny houses. Anti-consumerism is the keystone to this lifestyle movement. For enthusiasts, …

Policy And Polity: Space, Boundaries, And Governance In Early Modern London, 1580-1640, Michael Britton

Dissertations - ALL

The kingdom's principal city for law, governance, trade, and consumption, early modern London experienced a period of rapid growth and sprawl from the mid-sixteenth century. This nurtured more dense and frequent mobility and produced a dynamic, kinetic city. For civic authorities, however, boundaries took on greater urgence. Drawing on theories and principles of border studies, this dissertation treats the city's boundaries as processes forged and transformed by engagement, by the interplay between popular activity, political programs, and perceptions of space and authority. Policy and Polity, Space, Boundaries, and Governance in Early Modern London, 1580-1640 examines bordering at London Bridge, the …

The Phase Behavior Of Ubqln Proteins And Implications For Protein Quality Control, Yiran Yang

Dissertations - ALL

The ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) and autophagy are essential pathways for maintaining protein quality control (PQC) in cells. Misfolded proteins and large aggregates are cleared by UPS and autophagy signaled by ubiquitin (Ub) or polyubiquitin (polyUb) chains. Shuttle proteins facilitate cargo transporting by interacting with both ubiquitin and degradation machineries. Previously, our lab discovered that the shuttle protein Ubiquilin-2 (UBQLN2) is recruited to stress granules in cells and undergoes liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) in vitro. LLPS is a biophysical process by which proteins separate themselves from the surrounding aqueous solution by forming protein-rich droplets. The overarching goals of this work are …

Adsorption Of Organic Iodides On Reduced Silver Functionalized Silica Aerogel, Siqi Tang

Dissertations - ALL

In the nuclear waste reprocessing, radioactive iodine is released in both organic and inorganic forms into off-gas streams. Due to its properties of long half-life and accumulation in human bodies, the radioactive iodine is required to be removed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). In this presented work, the removal of organic iodides is studied particularly. Unlike that of inorganic iodine, the organic iodides were not well studied because of the low concentrations and the corresponding technical difficulties. Most of the studies on the organic iodides are semi-quantified, focusing on the performances of the adsorption …

Not Appropriate For Children: A Look At The Composition Practices And Rhetorical Strategies Of Single Moms In Academia, Alexandria Margethe Hanson

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation explores how single mothers in higher education across geographic locations, academic ranks, disciplines, and identities build support systems and draw on rhetorical strategies derived from their embodied knowledge to survive and navigate in academia. Single mother experiences are underrepresented in scholarship about parenting in higher education. This absence is evidenced in policies, systems, and structures that prioritize the needs of heteronormative family units. The lived experiences and material realities of single mothers reveal how their lives outside academia shape and are shaped by their lives within it, including scholarly activity, interactions with colleagues, and relationships with their children. …

Analysis Of Multiple Degree-Of-Freedom Oscillatory Aquatic Propulsion, Seth Alan Brooks

Dissertations - ALL

Propulsive performance and flow field data were experimentally measured for a two degree-of-freedom fish platform. The fish platform was designed and constructed based on the yellowfin tuna (\textit{Thunnus albacares}) that is known to be both fast and efficient. This work extends the current understanding of oscillatory aquatic propulsion to a three-dimensional fish platform with full volume flow field data and propulsive performance. A parametric sweep of trailing-edge amplitude of the caudal fin ($A$), heave-to-pitch ratio ($h^*$), and phase offset between the two degrees-of-freedom ($\phi$) was used to explore a parameter space that encompasses and extends beyond the known biological domain. …

Rehabilitation Sciences News, Georgia Southern University

Clinical Sciences: News & Publications (2018-2023)

• Making the Community More Inclusive Through ACC Boards

Examining The Role Of Marine Mammals And Seabirds In Southeast Alaska’S Marine Ecosystem Dynamics, Melissa Rhodes-Reese, David Clay, Curry Cunningham, Janet Moriles-Miller, Cheryl Reese, Joe Roman, Joseph D. Warren, Heidi C. Pearson

Faculty, Staff, and Students

Primary producers are the foundation of marine food webs and require reliable nutrient sources to maintain their important role with ecosystems. While marine mammals and seabirds can play critical roles in marine nutrient cycling, their contributions are often overlooked. The fjord systems of Southeast Alaska support a high diversity of marine mammals and seabirds in addition to some of the most valuable fisheries in the US. Nonetheless, there is still relatively little known about nutrient sources and fluxes in this region which is a critical component of fisheries management. The goal of our study was to advance knowledge of the …

Review Of Introducing Marketing, Xiaojing Sheng

Open Educational Resources - Reviews

No abstract provided.

Review Of Key Elements Of Green Chemistry, Debasish Bandyopadhyay

Open Educational Resources - Reviews

No abstract provided.

Exploiting Building Demand Flexibility Through Machine Learning For Building-To-Grid Integration, Hannah Charlene Fontenot

Dissertations - ALL

Demand flexibility – the ability to adjust a building's load profile across different timescales – is a key aspect of the ongoing effort to increase interconnectivity between buildings and the power grid. By harnessing their demand flexibility, buildings can provide significant benefits to the grid and bolster grid resilience and reliability. To facilitate the transition toward the "smart grid", new and intelligent control approaches are required that can seamlessly integrate building, occupant, and grid data and effectively control multiple building assets to provide grid services while maintaining occupants' required thermal comfort levels and reducing the building's overall energy consumption and …

Algorithm Hardware Codesign For High Performance Neuromorphic Computing, Haowen Fang

Dissertations - ALL

Driven by the massive application of Internet of Things (IoT), embedded system and Cyber Physical System (CPS) etc., there is an increasing demand to apply machine intelligence on these power limited scenarios. Though deep learning has achieved impressive performance on various realistic and practical tasks such as anomaly detection, pattern recognition, machine vision etc., the ever-increasing computational complexity and model size of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) make it challenging to deploy them onto aforementioned scenarios where computation, memory and energy resource are all limited. Early studies show that biological systems' energy efficiency can be orders of magnitude higher than that …

Direct Single Molecule Imaging Of Enhanced Diffusion For Enzymes And Enzyme-Conjugated Dna Origami, Mengqi Xu

Dissertations - ALL

Enzymes have been shown to diffuse faster in the presence of their substrates. Recently, we revealed new insights into this process of enhanced diffusion using single-particle tracking (SPT) with total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy. We found that the mobility of individual enzymes was enhanced three-fold in the presence of the substrate, and the motion remained Brownian. We showed that the relative increase in diffusion is independent of the total enzyme concentrations; and the oligomerization state of enzymes did not change during the catalytic turnover. These experiments ruled out the possibility that the enhanced enzyme diffusion was caused by the …

A Graduatte Level Immersive-Simulattion Program For Teaching And Assessing Fundamental Skills In Entry Level Clinical Perfusionists., Bruce Searles

Dissertations - ALL

Background: The clinical perfusionist is a member of the open-heart-surgery team and responsible for operating the life support equipment that replaces the function of the patient's heart and lungs and arrests and restarts the patient's heart in the course of a Cardiopulmonary Bypass (CPB) procedure. In the perfusionists scope of practice, the consequence of unskilled actions, inaccurate understanding or delayed decision making may result in significant patient morbidity or even death. Historically, perfusion students have learned and practiced their skills within a clinical preceptorship program in which an experienced clinician allows the novice student to operate the life support equipment …

Developing An Air Pollutant Emissions Database For Global Economic Analysis, Maksym Chepeliev

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

According to the Global Burden of Disease study (Cohen et al., 2017), in 2015 ambient air pollutant emissions caused 4.2 million deaths and a loss of 103.1 million disability-adjusted life-years, making it the fifth-ranked global risk factor. In terms of the welfare costs of mortality and illnesses associated with outdoor air pollutant emissions, global estimates for 2015 range between $2.7-3.2 trillion (Coady et al., 2015; OECD, 2016). Still, while greenhouse gas emissions are usually well represented in many global economic databases and models, air pollutant emission accounts in most cases are not included. In particular, this is the case for …

2012 December University Of Memphis Commencement Program

Commencements

Program for the Fall convocation of the 101st commencement of the University of Memphis at Memphis, Tennessee, held at the FedEx Forum on December 16, 2012.

Characterizing Primary Care For Patients With Major Depressive Disorder Using Electronic Health Records Of A Us-Based Healthcare Provider, Sharon L. Larson, Andrei Nemoianu, Debra F Lawrence, Melissa A Troup, Michael R Gionfriddo, Bobak Pousti, Haiyan Sun, Faisal Riaz, Eric S Wagner, Lambros Chrones, Maelys Touya

College of Population Health Faculty Papers

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is predominantly managed in primary care. However, primary care providers (PCPs) may not consistently follow evidence-based treatment algorithms, leading to variable patient management that can impact outcomes.

Methods: We retrospectively analyzed adult patients with MDD seen at Geisinger, an integrated health system. Utilizing electronic health record (EHR) data, we classified patients as having MDD based on International Classification of Disease (ICD)-9/10 codes or a Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ)-9 score ≥5. Outcomes assessed included time to first visit with a PCP or behavioral health specialist following diagnosis, antidepressant medication switching, persistence, healthcare resource utilization (HRU), and …

A Pilot Study Exploring The Relationship Between Urban Greenspace Accessibility And Mental Health Prevalence In The City Of San Diego In The Context Of Socioeconomic And Demographic Factors, Alexis Wilderman, Marcus Lam, Zhi-Yong Yin

Environmental and Ocean Sciences: Faculty Scholarship

The connection between urban greenspace and mental health is a robust but unsettled area of research in the public health and urban planning literatures. Inconsistent findings in prior studies are mostly due to differences in greenspace measurements and interrelations with socio-demographic factors. This study examines the relationships of mental health prevalence (MHP) with health prevention, socioeconomic and race-ethnicity factors, and proximity to greenspace at the census-tract level in the City of San Diego, California, using data from the CDC 500 Cities Project and US Census Bureau. We considered three greenspace proximity measures: distances to specified vegetation types, parks, and tree …

Proactive Public Libraries For Community Resilience And Ecological Sustainability, Alex Crowley

Student Theses

Public libraries are key institutions for dealing with crises in communities. In the midst of a devastating global pandemic and a continual wave of social uprisings, it is necessary for library workers to more seriously reckon with the need for drastic changes in the ways that public libraries respond to and operate within these conditions. It is unclear to what extent libraries have adopted significant changes recommended by organizations and professionals in the field to become resilient and ecologically sustainable. These changes include the abandonment of neutrality discourse, a democratic restructuring of workplaces, and the relocalization of library programs and …

Clinical Decision Making Of Rural Novice Nurses, Teresa J. Seright

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to develop substantive theory regarding decision making by the novice nurse in a rural hospital setting. Interviews were guided by the following research questions: What cues were used by novice rural registered nurses in order to make clinical decisions? What were the sources of feedback which influenced subsequent decision making for processing of cues?

Effectiveness Of A Simulated Hospital Day With Undergraduate Student Nurses: A Comparative Descriptive Design, Melissa A. Wholeben

Dissertations

Currently, outside forces create blocks that affect the quality and quantity of clinical experiences for pre-licensure nursing students. These limitations create an environment in which entry-level nursing students enter the workforce without a solid foundation in nursing concepts or in exposure to situations that they might encounter. To counter this dilemma, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) School of Nursing Center of Simulation created a simulation activity to allow participants an opportunity to immerse themselves in a simulated hospital environment while practicing skills to be used with future "real" patients. The purpose of this study is to determine …

Antimicrobial Susceptibility Of P. Aeruginosa Clinical Isolates, Tian Gao

Theses - ALL

Long-term infection caused by P. aeruginosa poses a major threat to personal and public health, and causes billions of dollars in medical expenses. To develop more effective controls, it is important to accurately evaluate antibiotic susceptibility of clinical isolates and understand how susceptibility changes during the course of infection. Conventional drug susceptibility tests using nutrient-rich media have been questioned regarding their relevance due to the difference between the model in vivo test conditions and the environment in the patients. Here, we report that 27 clinical strains of P. aeruginosa isolated from cystic fibrosis patients showed higher drug resistance in Artificial …