Digital Commons Network^™

Nostalgia For The 24th Century: How Nerd Billionaires Use Star Trek For Self-Promotion, Kurt Eggers

English

This paper examines how tech industry leaders, who I dub “nerd billionaires,” use references to Star Trek (ST) as a way to connect with the positive impression fans have of its utopian world. I show how they use ST to imply that their business interests serve to benefit, and potentially save, humanity. My study provides background on ST’s utopia and uses Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory to demonstrate why ST at first appears incompatible with the goals of big business. By applying post-Marxist critical theory to ST media, I examine ST’s ideological implications and analyze why ST has proven to be …

Multiplex Hextuple Luciferase Assaying, Alejandro Sarrion-Perdigones, Yezabel Gonzalez, Lyra Chang, Tatiana Gallego-Flores, Damian W Young, Koen J T Venken

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

We recently expanded the commonly used dual luciferase assaying method toward multiplex hextuple luciferase assaying, allowing monitoring the activity of five experimental pathways against one control at the same time. In doing so, while our expanded assay utilizes a total of six orthogonal luciferases instead of two, this assay, conveniently, still utilizes the well-established reagents and principles of the widely used dual luciferase assay. Three quenchable D-luciferin-consuming luciferases are measured after addition of D-Luciferin substrate, followed by quenching of their bioluminescence (BL) and the measurement of three coelenterazine (CTZ)-consuming luciferases after addition of CTZ substrate, all in the same vessel. …

Stealing Organs?, Benjamin J. Mcmichael

Articles

Every nine minutes, a new person joins a waitlist for an organ transplant, and every day, seventeen people die waiting for an organ that will never come. Because the need for organ transplants far outstrips the number of available organs, the policies and rules governing organ allocation in the United States are critically important and highly contentious. Recently, proponents of a new allocation system one focused more on sharing organs across the nation instead of allocating organs primarily to local transplant candidates have gained ground. Bolstered by two separate lawsuits in the past five years, advocates of greater national sharing …

Promoting Vaccine Innovation, Mirit Eyal-Cohen, Ana Santos Rutschman

Articles

As society grows to understand the need to promote innovation, policymakers try to employ an arsenal of policy tools, from traditional intellectual property ("JP") to newer tools such as grants, regulatory vouchers, and prizes. This Article argues that these frameworks crowd out certain types of investments in innovation projects that have a high social value. Vaccine innovation is a case in point. Despite the immense socioeconomic benefit of vaccines, existing policies have been limited in fostering investments in this space. This is because they fail to directly address the relevant bottleneck issues distinct to vaccine development.

This Article offers a …

Assessing Amateurism In College Sports, Casey E. Faucon

Articles

College sports generate approximately $8 billion each year for the National C[artel] Athletic Association and its member institutions. Most of this revenue flows from lucrative television broadcasting deals, which often incorporate the right to commercialize and sell the names, images, and likenesses of college athletes. Under its current revenue scheme, student-athletes-85 percent of whom live below the poverty line-receive a share of zero. For over a century, we've justified this exploitative distribution scheme under a cloak of student-athlete "amateurism." Antitrust challenges to the NCAA's amateurism rules clash with the assumption that "amateurism" is a revered tradition and an important tenet …

"Show Me Your Gun": A Way Forward On Waiting Periods Annual Survey: Gun Reform Symposium, Fredrick Vars

Articles

No abstract provided.

Towards Advanced Data Skills For Information Systems Graduates, Ashraf Shirani

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This study aims to explore advanced data skills -in particular technical skills expected of a data engineering (DE) professional. Descriptions and requirements for the DE jobs, one each from 50 US companies, were collected from three job sites. An automated text analysis was performed on the job descriptions to extract a list of technical skills and competencies required for the DE job in the industry. The extracted information was then manually synthesized and categorized by the author. Findings of the study are intended to be of use by information systems graduates looking to pursue advanced data education and for curricula …

Adult Memory T Cell Responses To The Respiratory Syncytial Virus Fusion Protein During A Single Rsv Season (2018-2019), Brittani N Blunck, Laura S Angelo, David Henke, Vasanthi Avadhanula, Matthew Cusick, Laura Ferlic-Stark, Lynn Zechiedrich, Brian E Gilbert, Pedro A Piedra

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is ubiquitous and re-infection with both subtypes (RSV/A and RSV/B) is common. The fusion (F) protein of RSV is antigenically conserved, induces neutralizing antibodies, and is a primary target of vaccine development. Insight into the breadth and durability of RSV-specific adaptive immune response, particularly to the F protein, may shed light on susceptibility to re-infection. We prospectively enrolled healthy adult subjects (n = 19) and collected serum and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) during the 2018–2019 RSV season. Previously, we described their RSV-specific antibody responses and identified three distinct antibody kinetic profiles associated with infection …

Unique Challenges To Diagnosing Human Herpesvirus-6 (Hhv-6) Encephalitis Following Post-Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant: A Case And Brief Review, Harrison Zhu, Amir Ali, Karrune V Woan, Eric Tam, George Yaghmour, Alan Flores, Preet Chaudhary

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

A patient with an ultimate diagnosis of human herpesvirus-6 (HHV-6) encephalitis developed central nervous system (CNS) symptoms 13 days after undergoing myeloablative haploidentical allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT). Due to the patient's body habitus, magnetic resonance (MR) imaging was not obtained until the onset of retrograde amnesia on day +24. MR imaging and other clinical findings eliminated all skepticism of HHV-6 encephalitis and HHV-6 antivirals were initiated on day +28, leading to gradual recovery. This case demonstrates some of the factors that may complicate the diagnosis of post-alloHSCT HHV-6 encephalitis. Because HHV-6 encephalitis and viremia can occur without warning, …

The Lasting Impact Of Deinstitutionalization: Policing And The Mental Health Crisis, Ruqayyah Sorathia

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

Society is combating the detrimental effects of the deinstitutionalization policy, which transferred the treatment of mentally ill patients from state-run psychiatric hospitals to community-run psychiatric facilities. These patients frequently fall into relapses and are more likely to experience risky encounters with law enforcement officials who have no formal training in dealing with them. The paper analyzes the criminalization of mentally ill people, many with substance abuse and alcohol addictions, receiving treatment in jails and state prisons. Incarcerating people with mental illness, though reducing the homeless population from the street and disturbances faced by the public, still does not address the …

Sentiment Analysis Of Covid-19 Vaccination Impact On Twitter Tweets Using Nlp Supervised Learning And Rnn Classification Comparison, Tanvir Ahmed

Computer Science

Twitter provides a platform for exchanging information and opinions on global concerns like the COVID-19 epidemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a collection of around 16,180 tweets to derive inferences regarding public views toward the vaccine impact once immunizations became widely available to the community. We use natural language processing and sentiment analysis techniques to uncover information regarding the public's perception of the COVID-19 vaccine. Our findings demonstrate that people are more pleased about taking COVID-19 shots than they are about some of the vaccines' side effects. We also look at people's reactions to COVID-19 safety measures after they …

Pattern Recognition And Quantifying Associations Within Entities Of Data Driven Systems For Improving Model Interpretability, Arighna Roy

Computer Science

Discovering associations among entities of a system plays an important role in data science. The majority of the data science related problems have become heavily dependent on Machine Learning (ML) since the rise of computation power. However, the majority of the machine learning approaches rely on improving the performance of the algorithm by optimizing an objective function, at the cost of compromising the interpretability of the models. A new branch of machine learning focuses on model interpretability by explaining the models in various ways. The foundation of model interpretability is built on extracting patterns from the behavior of the models …

Understanding The Patterns Of Microservice Intercommunication From A Developer Perspective, Anas Nadeem

Computer Science

Microservices Architecture is the modern paradigm for designing software. Based on the divide-and-conquer strategy, microservices architecture organizes the application by furnishing it with a fine-level granularity. Each microservice has a well-defined responsibility and multiple microservices communicate with each other toward a common goal. A momentous decision in designing microservices applications is the choice between orchestration or choreography-based modes as the underlying intercommunication pattern. Choreography entails that microservices work autonomously while orchestration entails that a central coordinator directs the interaction between services. We arbitrate this decision from a developer’s perspective by empirically evaluating the properties of a benchmark system mapped into …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Music Recommendations Using Cosine Similarities Of Various Combined Feature Sets Consisting Of Metadata And User Generated Tags, Shubhit Kumar

Computer Science

This paper aims to compare and evaluate the methods for recommending songs using metadata, user generated tags, metadata and tags, and metadata and top five tags. Recommendations are calculated using cosine similarities with relevant exceptions (artist filtering, tag filtering, year to decade conversion) investigated.

Achievements And Prospects Of Functional Pavement: Materials And Structures, Jian-Long Zheng, Zhanping You, Xueyan Liu

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

No abstract provided.

Estimation Of Intrafamilial Dna Contamination In Family Trio Genome Sequencing Using Deviation From Mendelian Inheritance, Christopher J Yoon, Brian Wiley, Malachi Griffith, Obi L Griffith, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

With the increasing number of sequencing projects involving families, quality control tools optimized for family genome sequencing are needed. However, accurately quantifying contamination in a DNA mixture is particularly difficult when genetically related family members are the sources. We developed TrioMix, a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) framework based on Mendel's law of inheritance, to quantify DNA mixture between family members in genome sequencing data of parent-offspring trios. TrioMix can accurately deconvolute any intrafamilial DNA contamination, including parent-offspring, sibling-sibling, parent-parent, and even multiple familial sources. In addition, TrioMix can be applied to detect genomic abnormalities that deviate from Mendelian inheritance patterns, …

Responding To Sexual Abuse In Health Care: Development Of A Guide For Patients, Tristan Mcintosh, Heidi Walsh, Meredith Parsons, Erin D Solomon, Jessica Mozersky, James M Dubois

2020-Current year OA Pubs

This report details the development of a stakeholder- and evidence-informed online resource guide for patients that provides information to raise awareness about sexual abuse in health care, the value of chaperones, and options for responding to sexual abuse. The guide was developed to reflect lessons learned from 10 years of researching physician wrongdoing (ie, sexual violations, improper prescribing, and unnecessary invasive procedures), a 5-year National Institutes of Health-funded mixed-methods study of 280 cases of egregious wrongdoing in medicine, and an expert working group. Focus groups were conducted with 22 patients from diverse backgrounds to obtain feedback on the acceptability of …

Core Outcome Set Development For Childhood Epilepsy Treated With Ketogenic Diet Therapy: Results Of A Scoping Review And Parent Interviews, Jennifer H. Carroll, Kirsty J. Martin-Mcgill, J. Helen Cross, Mary Hickson, Emma Williams, Val Aldridge, Avril Collinson

School of Health Professions

PurposeClinical trials on childhood epilepsy treated with ketogenic diet (KD) use a wide range of outcomes, however, patients and decision-makers often do not perceive the outcomes used as the most important. We sought parental opinion on outcomes of importance and compared these to outcomes reported in published research.MethodsEthical approval (London-Surrey-REC19/LO/1680). A scoping review identified outcomes reported in previous studies of childhood epilepsy and KD. Parents were recruited from nine KD centres (UK), charities and social media (international), then interviewed (Jan-April 2020) to explore priority outcomes. Content analysis identified all outcomes in transcripts. Parent identified outcomes were compared with those in …

Emotional And Behavioural Responses To Covid-19: Explanations From Three Key Models Of Personality, Alison M. Bacon, Dino Krupić, Nese Caki, Philip J. Corr

School of Psychology

This review appraises evidence for the role of personality in Covid-19 related emotions and behaviours. Three key models of personality are considered: the Five factor Model, HEXACO model and Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory. In line with personality research more generally, most studies focus on the Five-Factor model. Key findings are that neuroticism is most associated with poor mental health, and extraversion is associated with a reluctance to socially isolate. Conscientiousness predicts compliance with safety guidelines, but also with fewer prosocial behaviours, particularly stockpiling. Research within the HEXACO framework largely confirms these findings, especially for emotionality and mental health. The additional HEXACO …

Research Is Everyone's Business... Isn’T It? A Uk-Wide Survey To Understand The Current Ahp Research Culture In The Nhs, C Payne, C Comer, A Mccracken, R Collings, N Cullum

School of Health Professions

No abstract provided.

Blood Donation; Motivators And Barriers Among The Attendees Of The National Centre For Blood Transfusion/ Baghdad 2019, Marwah Abdullah, Wijdan Hussein

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

BACKGROUND: Willingness to donate blood is affected by many factors such as availability of blood banks and their accessibility to the public, awareness regarding blood donation and knowledge about blood donation. AIMS: To evaluate the (Knowledge, attitude and practice) in a sample of subjects toward blood donation. To determine motivators and barriers that influence blood donation and to study the influence of some demographic character with the means of the KAP scores. METHODS: A descriptive cross sectional study was conducted in the National Centre for Blood Donation in Baghdad, data collection was carried out from 1st of March to 31st …

Carotid Artery Intimal Medial Thickness In Acute Ischemic Stroke Subtypes And Intracerebral Hemorrhage, Abbas Nasser, Zaki Hasan

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

BACKGROUND: Stroke is the second cause of adult death globally. The Intimal Medial Thickness of the Carotid Artery is regarded as a measure of atherosclerosis. Since the pathogenesis and treatment differ among stroke subtypes; therefore, evaluating the intimal medial thickness may help in distinguishing intracerebral hemorrhage from other ischemic stroke subtypes. OBJECTIVE: To assess the carotid artery intimal medial thickness in ischemic stroke Subdivisions and intracerebral hemorrhage. METHOD: A cross-sectional case-control study of 200 subjects, 100 patients with different Stroke subtypes and 100 control that are age and gender matched. All subjects were examined by B-mode ultra-sonography to measure the …

Antibacterial Effectivity Of Coffee Bean Extract And Instant Coffee (Spray Drying) Against Porphyromonas Gingivalis, Tantin Ermawati, Nazilaturrohmah, Achmad Gunadi, Dessy Rachmawaty

Journal of Dentomaxillofacial Science

No abstract provided.

Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (Mic) And Minimum Bactericidal Concentration Of Beluntas Leaf Ethanol Extract Against Streptococcus Mutans, Elin Septiani, Natallia Pranata, Vinna K. Sugiaman

Journal of Dentomaxillofacial Science

No abstract provided.

Oro-Dental Care Of Visually Impaired Child: A Case Report, Ayesha, Krishna P. Vellore, Santosh K. Challa, Niharika S., K. Saigeeta

Journal of Dentomaxillofacial Science

No abstract provided.

Nurse Staffing And Adverse Events In Residential Aged Care: Retrospective Multi-Site Analysis, Dorika Nhongo, Annie Holt, Tracy Flenady, Amanda Rebar, Kasia Bail

Medical Papers and Journal Articles

Background: People living in residential aged care homes are entitled to a safe environment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Unfortunately, past evidence tells us this is not always the case and that our most vulnerable population experience high rates of adverse events.

Aim: To determine whether after-hours shifts are associated with number of adverse events, independent of registered nurse staffing levels and residential aged care home size.

Methods: Retrospective cohort design with multilevel modelling. Adverse events, registered nurse staffing and facility size were collected via routine reporting from ten homes (1020 beds) in one Australian state for …

Accessing Antenatal Care When You Are Rough Sleeping: Barriers And Enablers, Lisa Wood, Natalie Bogoias

IHR Papers and Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Sudras And The Nation: Periyarist Explorations, Karthick Ram Manoharan

Popular Media

The sudra question is a complicated one in Indian sociology, history and politics, but it had an impact on a significant period of the Dravidian movement. Periyar E.V. Ramasamy referred to the non-Brahmin castes of South India, who did not belong to the ‘untouchable’ communities, as sudras, the lowest varna in the Hindu social order. He used the inferiorized identity of ‘sudra’ not in assertion or pride, but as a social critique of brahminism. Acknowledging the existence of multiple jatis within the sudra varna, Periyar criticized their notions of hierarchy towards each other and especially towards the Dalits. He sought …

Without Lowering Unemployment Rates, India Cannot Effectively Address Inequality, Rashmi Venkatesan

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Exploring Issues Of Resilience And Technology Use For Older People - A Scoping Review Protocol, Timothy J. Smith, Khui Hung Lee, Kan Yu, Leisa Armstrong, David M. Cook

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The aim of this scoping review is to understand the extent of issues of resilience implied by the interactions of older people with financial, social, and health related technologies. Older people aged 60+, technology use or non-use, and issues of resilience studied over the last four years (2019-2022) demarcate the scope of this review. Key exclusion criteria are older adults living in long-term care facilities, nursing homes, care homes and hospital in-patients. It also excludes studies on the perspectives of older peoples’ clinicians. The review will be carried out according to the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) scoping review methodology. The …