Digital Commons Network^™

2021-December-01-Etsu Health Partners With Healing Hands, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

Healing Hands

From left, Dr. Amanda Stoltz and Dr. John Culp are among physicians from ETSU Health Family Medicine Bristol who have partnered with Helen Scott, director of Healing Hands Health Center, to provide health care to low-income and uninsured individuals in the region.

BRISTOL, Tenn. – ETSU Health’s Family Medicine Bristol clinic is providing even more health care to low-income and uninsured individuals through a partnership with Healing Hands Health Center.

Healing Hands, located at 245 Midway Medical Park, is a charitable medical and dental clinic that provides care to adults in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. East Tennessee …

2021-December-01-Etsu Releases Annual Holiday Video, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

Need a nudge to get in the holiday spirit? 

East Tennessee State University has released its annual holiday video, a parody of “Santa Baby” with the lyrics rewritten to “Santa Bucky.”

Making a festive appearance in the 2021 edition is Greyscale, one of ETSU’s best known a cappella ensembles. They perform a broad mix of music, including jazz and pop, and are well-known on campus and throughout the region.

ETSU President Dr. Brian Noland and First Lady Donna Noland are also part of the video, as is the university’s mascot, Bucky.

Parts of the video are shot at University Commons, …

2021-December-01-Etsu Scholars Publishing On Politics, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (Dec. 1, 2021) – Professors in the Department of Political Science, International Affairs & Public Administration at East Tennessee State University are producing important research.

Two faculty members published books this year. 

“These fine contributions to the discipline reinforce that our department is home to first-rate scholars doing important research,” said Dr. Colin Glennon, associate professor and chair of the department. “Our faculty model the essential role of the teacher-scholar, one who is deeply engaged with students in the classroom and salient research outside of it.”

 Dr. Frederick Gordon’s book, “The Damming of the Presidency: How Environmental …

2021-December-01-Meet Pamela AvendañO-Rubi, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

Language is what ties everything and everyone together for Pamela Avendaño-Rubi, whose native language of Spanish has been the key to relationships and opportunities throughout her time at East Tennessee State University.

“I was born and raised in Mexico, and it wasn’t until maybe seven or eight years ago that I first learned English. That was the biggest thing ever,” said the senior pre-medical student. “So, I empathize with a lot of people for whom English is a second language, even the professors here who have English as a second language and they struggle to express themselves. I am able …

2021-December-01-Paleontologists Discover Extinct Relative Of Tennessee State Wildflower, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (December 2021) – For Tennesseans, passion flowers are a point of regional pride, officially designated as a Tennessee state flower back in 1919. Now, a century later, paleontologists have found fossil evidence of an extinct Appalachian passion flower species, Passiflora appalachiana, previously unknown to science. 

This ancient species is unique to the fossil record of Tennessee, museum officials said, and it is proof that these flowers have adorned the local landscape for millions of years.

The fossils were found at the Gray Fossil Site, overseen by the Don Sundquist Center of Excellence in Paleontology at East …

2021-December-01-Tri-Cities Proclaims Friday 'Blue And Gold Day', University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. —  The Tri-Cities may be lit up in a rainbow of colors for the holiday season, but, this Friday, the region is going all in on blue and gold. Leaders in Bristol, Jonesborough, Johnson City and Kingsport are all declaring Friday, Dec. 3, “Blue and Gold Day” in celebration of the East Tennessee State University football team’s run for the national championship. Mayors Mahlon Luttrell, Chuck Vest, Joe Wise, and Pat Shull are encouraging area residents to decorate homes, schools and businesses in blue and gold and wear the ETSU colors on Friday. 

“East Tennessee State University …

2021-December-01-Entrepreneurship-In-Residence Program Announced At Etsu, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. – In a first-of-its-kind initiative in the region, the College of Business and Technology at East Tennessee State University has announced the start of its Entrepreneurship-In-Residence (EIR) program, exposing student candidates to startup investment decisions.  

The program is a collaborative effort between The Angel Roundtable (ART) of the Appalachian Highlands and the Entrepreneurship Program at ETSU’s College of Business and Technology. The Angel Roundtable is a network of successful entrepreneurs, investors, and community business leaders from Northeast Tennessee, Southwest Virginia and Western North Carolina who provide investment capital and strategic advice to late-seed and early-stage companies to …

2021-December-01-Etsu Commencement, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY – East Tennessee State University will confer more than 1,300 degrees during Commencement Exercises on Saturday, Dec. 11, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. in the Ballad Health Athletic Center. Gayle Conelly Manchin, who is federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), will deliver the keynote address at 10 a.m. ETSU faculty member Dr. Sean Fox, who won the Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching, will address graduates during the 2 p.m. ceremony.

Manchin works directly with the ARC’s 13 member governors, their state alternates and program managers, and a network of local development districts to continue to …

2021-December-01-Etsu Professor Writes About Plantation Sites Remembering Slavery, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (December 2021) – Plantation sites have the ability to better tell the histories of former slaves in the United States. 

That point drives the new book, “Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum.” East Tennessee State University’s Dr. Candace Forbes Bright is one of the book’s authors. 

Examining multiple plantation sites across the American South, these scholars consider the experiences of tourists, museum managers and tour guides.  

As the public and scholars alike debate how to best understand and remember slavery in the U.S., this work is designed to help professionals reassemble the narratives and landscapes of …

2021-December-01-Etsu Releases Annual Holiday Video, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

Need a nudge to get in the holiday spirit? 

East Tennessee State University has released its annual holiday video, a parody of “Santa Baby” with the lyrics rewritten to “Santa Bucky.”

Making a festive appearance in the 2021 edition is Greyscale, one of ETSU’s best known a cappella ensembles. They perform a broad mix of music, including jazz and pop, and are well-known on campus and throughout the region.

ETSU President Dr. Brian Noland and First Lady Donna Noland are also part of the video, as is the university’s mascot, Bucky.

Parts of the video are shot at University Commons, …

2021-December-01-Etsu Scholars Publishing On Politics, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (Dec. 1, 2021) – Professors in the Department of Political Science, International Affairs & Public Administration at East Tennessee State University are producing important research.

Two faculty members published books this year. 

“These fine contributions to the discipline reinforce that our department is home to first-rate scholars doing important research,” said Dr. Colin Glennon, associate professor and chair of the department. “Our faculty model the essential role of the teacher-scholar, one who is deeply engaged with students in the classroom and salient research outside of it.”

 Dr. Frederick Gordon’s book, “The Damming of the Presidency: How Environmental …

2021-December-01-Tri-Cities Proclaims Friday 'Blue And Gold Day', University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. —  The Tri-Cities may be lit up in a rainbow of colors for the holiday season, but, this Friday, the region is going all in on blue and gold. Leaders in Bristol, Jonesborough, Johnson City and Kingsport are all declaring Friday, Dec. 3, “Blue and Gold Day” in celebration of the East Tennessee State University football team’s run for the national championship. Mayors Mahlon Luttrell, Chuck Vest, Joe Wise, and Pat Shull are encouraging area residents to decorate homes, schools and businesses in blue and gold and wear the ETSU colors on Friday. 

“East Tennessee State University …

2021-December-01-Paleontologists Discover Extinct Relative Of Tennessee State Wildflower, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (December 2021) – For Tennesseans, passion flowers are a point of regional pride, officially designated as a Tennessee state flower back in 1919. Now, a century later, paleontologists have found fossil evidence of an extinct Appalachian passion flower species, Passiflora appalachiana, previously unknown to science. 

This ancient species is unique to the fossil record of Tennessee, museum officials said, and it is proof that these flowers have adorned the local landscape for millions of years.

The fossils were found at the Gray Fossil Site, overseen by the Don Sundquist Center of Excellence in Paleontology at East …

Toxicity And Effects Of Tire Crumb Rubber In The Aquatic Environment, Stephanie Laplaca

All Dissertations

Plastic materials have provided innovative solutions to society’s evolving needs and challenges. Due to their durability and resistance to degradation, plastics remain in the environment for long periods of time and can therefore be transported to many environmental compartments such as water, sediment, and biota. Microplastics (MPs) have been defined as synthetic plastic particles that have at least one dimension less than 5 mm and are insoluble in water. Microrubber (MR), a recently acknowledged sub-group of MPs, has been documented in environmental samples more recently, frequently comprising a large portion of total MPs of various samples. In South Carolina specifically, …

Isolating The White Matter Circuitry Of The Dorsal Language Stream: Connectome-Symptom Mapping In Stroke Induced Aphasia, Vatche Baboyan, Alexandra Basilaskos, Grigori Yourganov, Chris Rorden, Leonardo Bonilha, Julius Fridiksson, Gregory Hickok

Faculty Publications

The application of �� 1 -regularized machine learning models to high-dimensional connectomes offers a promising methodology to assess clinical-anatomical correlations in humans. Here, we integrate the connectome-based lesion-symptom mapping framework with sparse partial least squares regression (sPLS-R) to isolate elements of the connectome associated with speech repetition deficits. By mapping over 2,500 connections of the structural connectome in a cohort of 71 stroke-induced cases of aphasia presenting with varying left-hemisphere lesions and repetition impairment, sPLS-R was trained on 50 subjects to algorithmically identify connectomic features on the basis of their predictive value. The highest ranking features were subsequently used to …

Devfold: A Toolbox For Designing Age-Specific Fnirs Channel Placement, Xiaoxue (Jessie) Fu Ph.D., John E. Richards

Faculty Publications

Significance: Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a noninvasive technique that uses scalp-placed sensors to measure cerebral hemoglobin concentration. Commercial NIRS instruments do not allow for whole-head coverage and do not intrinsically indicate which brain areas generate the NIRS signal. Hence, the challenge is to design source–detector channel arrangement that maximizes sensitivity to a given brain region of interest (ROI). Existing methods for optimizing channel placement design have been developed using adult head models. Thus, they have limited utility for developmental research.

Aim: We aim to build an application from an existing toolbox (fOLD) that guides NIRS channel configuration based on age …

2021-December-Uh Alumni Homecoming Newsletter December 2021, University School, East Tennessee State University, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

Link to University School Alumni Homecoming Newsletter, December 2021

Greetings to our University, Training and Model School Alumni, we hope this message finds each of you doing well!  As we wrap up the semester and final school week for 2021, I would like to take a moment to thank you all for your continued support of University School. The tradition of excellence which has been established at University School is one that we value tremendously and take great pride in continuing!  We believe this is a direct impact of the commitment of our alumni, staff (both past and present) …

Author Correction To: Corticostriatal Functional Connectivity Of Bothersome Tinnitus In Single-Sided Deafness (Scientific Reports, (2019), 9, 1, (19552), 10.1038/S41598-019-56127-1), Jennifer Henderson-Sabes, Yingying Shang, Philip L. Perez, Jolie L. Chang, Seth E. Pross, Anne M. Findlay, Danielle Mizuiri, Leighton B. Hinkley, Srikantan S. Nagarajan, Steven W. Cheung

All Faculty Scholarship

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

“Now I Feel A Little Bit More Secure”: The Impact Of Snap Enrollment On Older Adult Ssi Recipients, Katie Savin, Alena Morales, Ronli Levi, Dora Alvarez, Hilary Seligman

All Faculty Scholarship

In June 2019, California expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries for the first time. This research assesses the experience and impact of new SNAP enrollment among older adult SSI recipients, a population characterized by social and economic precarity. We conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 SNAP participants to explore their experiences with new SNAP benefits. Following initial coding, member-check groups allowed for participants to provide feedback on preliminary data analysis. Findings demonstrate that SNAP enrollment improved participants’ access to nutritious foods of their choice, contributed to overall budgets, eased mental distress resulting from …

Specific Splice Junction Detection In Single Cells With Sicilian, Roozbeh Dehghannasiri, Julia E. Olivieri, Ana Damljanovic, Julia Salzman

All Faculty Articles - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Precise splice junction calls are currently unavailable in scRNA-seq pipelines such as the 10x Chromium platform but are critical for understanding single-cell biology. Here, we introduce SICILIAN, a new method that assigns statistical confidence to splice junctions from a spliced aligner to improve precision. SICILIAN is a general method that can be applied to bulk or single-cell data, but has particular utility for single-cell analysis due to that data’s unique challenges and opportunities for discovery. SICILIAN’s precise splice detection achieves high accuracy on simulated data, improves concordance between matched single-cell and bulk datasets, and increases agreement between biological replicates. SICILIAN …

Metabolic Syndrome And Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome In Hospitalized Patients With Covid-19, Joshua L Denson, Aaron S Gillet, Yuanhao Zu, Margo Brown, Thaidan Pham, Yilin Yoshida, Franck Mauvais-Jarvis, Ivor S Douglas, Mathew Moore, Kevin Tea, Andrew Wetherbie, Rachael Stevens, John Lefante, Jeffrey G Shaffer, Donna Lee Armaignac, Katherine Belden, Margit Kaufman, Smith F Heavner, Valerie C Danesh, Sreekanth R Cheruku, Catherine A St Hill, Karen Boman, Neha Deo, Vikas Bansal, Vishakha K Kumar, Allan J Walkey, Rahul Kashyap, Society Of Critical Care Medicine Discovery Viral Infection And Respiratory Illness Universal Study (Virus): Covid-19 Registry Investigator Group

Division of Infectious Diseases and Environmental Medicine Faculty Papers

Importance: Obesity, diabetes, and hypertension are common comorbidities in patients with severe COVID-19, yet little is known about the risk of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or death in patients with COVID-19 and metabolic syndrome.

Objective: To determine whether metabolic syndrome is associated with an increased risk of ARDS and death from COVID-19.

Design, setting, and participants: This multicenter cohort study used data from the Society of Critical Care Medicine Discovery Viral Respiratory Illness Universal Study collected from 181 hospitals across 26 countries from February 15, 2020, to February 18, 2021. Outcomes were compared between patients with metabolic syndrome (defined …

Index To Volume 89

Nebraska Bird Review

Adams, Marie 52

to

Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii 168 leucophrys 75, 168-169 oriantha 75, 169

Review Of The Sandhill Crane State: A Naturalist’S Guide To Nebraska By Paul Johnsgard, Ruth Stearns

Nebraska Bird Review

Dr. Paul Austin Johnsgard left us one last gift, in this reference guide to all places natural in Nebraska. Published posthumously, and available for purchase or free via UNL’s Digital Commons, this book arrived at my doorstep like a veritable “seed catalog” of Nebraska’s places of wonder to delight and inspire fair weather adventures just before the long winter set in. He wants us to explore the state as he had done, to be excited by all the out-ofdoors Nebraska has to offer.

Northern Saw-Whet Owl Autumn Migration In Eastern Nebraska: Results From A Three-Year Banding Study, Stephen J. Brenner, Joel G. Jorgensen

Nebraska Bird Review

Prior to 2019, records of NSWOs in Nebraska during fall were limited. There were fewer than five accepted reports in eastern Nebraska since the 1950s (Silcock and Jorgensen, 2021). The Hitchcock banding station along the Missouri River bluffs in nearby western Iowa has captured, banded, and released 20-50 birds during autumn migration for a number of years (J. Toll, personal communication). Furthermore, a single season banding study in central Nebraska during fall 2004 captured 14 NSWOs (Kim 2005), suggesting the species may migrate annually over much of the state in fall, or at least in more years than previously thought. …

Review Of Nest Records Of Nebraska Birds By Wayne J. Mollhoff, W. Ross Silcock

Nebraska Bird Review

This book summarizes a lifetime of investigation of Nebraska’s breeding birds by Wayne Mollhoff. Even though I say the book summarizes a lifetime of investigation, I would not be surprised if Wayne resurfaces in a few years with a follow-up of some sort, intrepid investigator that he is. Over the years Wayne has spent innumerable days in the field climbing trees in full forestry gear, wading and kayaking marshes and rivers, hiking over prairies, and bushwhacking through dense forests (there are still a few in Nebraska). But this isn’t the totality of Wayne’s talents; he is a determined researcher with …

News From The Bioconductor Project, Bioconductor Core Team

The R Journal

Bioconductor provides tools for the analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genomic data. Bioconductor 3.14 was released on 27 October, 2021. It is compatible with R 4.1.0 and consists of 2083 software packages, 408 experiment data packages, 904 up-to-date annotation packages, and 29 workflows.

Changes In R, Tomas Kalibera, Sebastian Meyer, Kurt Hornik, Gennadiy Starostin, Luke Tierney

The R Journal

We present important changes in the development version of R (referred to as R-devel, to become R 4.2) and give a summary of the new search engine interfaced by RSiteSearch(). Some statistics on bug tracking activities in 2021 are also provided.

Rpese: Risk And Performance Estimators Standard Errors With Serially Dependent Data, Anthony-Alexander Christidis, R Douglas Martin

The R Journal

The R package RPESE (Risk and Performance Estimators Standard Errors) implements a new method for computing accurate standard errors of risk and performance estimators when returns are serially dependent. The new method makes use of the representation of a risk or performance estimator as a summation of a time series of influence-function (IF) transformed returns, and computes estimator standard errors using a sophisticated method of estimating the spectral density at frequency zero of the time series of IF-transformed returns. Two additional packages used by RPESE are introduced, namely RPEIF which computes and provides graphical displays of the IF of risk …

The Vote Package: Single Transferable Vote And Other Electoral Systems In R, Adrian E. Raftery, Hana ŠevčÍková, Bernard W. Silverman

The R Journal

We describe the vote package in R, which implements the plurality (or first-past-the-post), two-round runoff, score, approval, and Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral systems, as well as methods for selecting the Condorcet winner and loser. We emphasize the STV system, which we have found to work well in practice for multi-winner elections with small electorates, such as committee and council elections, and the selection of multiple job candidates. For single-winner elections, STV is also called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), or the alternative vote (AV) system. The package also implements the STV system with equal preferences, for …

Volume Approximation And Sampling For Convex Polytopes In R, Apostolos Chalkis, Vissarion Fisikopoulos

The R Journal

Sampling from high-dimensional distributions and volume approximation of convex bodies are fundamental operations that appear in optimization, finance, engineering, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. In this paper, we present volesti, an R package that provides efficient, scalable algorithms for volume estimation, uniform, and Gaussian sampling from convex polytopes. volesti scales to hundreds of dimensions, handles efficiently three different types of polyhedra and provides non existing sampling routines to R. We demonstrate the power of volesti by solving several challenging problems using the R language