Digital Commons Network^™

A History Of The Scottish P.E.N. Organization, Part 1: 1927-1949, Helen Stoddart

Studies in Scottish Literature

The first article in a two-part series charting the history of Scottish PEN, from its founding in 1927, through political struggles in the 1930s, and at the international congress in Edinburgh in 1934, over issues of intellectual freedom and the rise of Hitler, till the need to reestablish the organization after World War II, exploring Scottish PEN's relationship to the 20th century Scottish Renaissance movement, and examining the roles in Scottish PEN of H.J.C. Grierson, C.M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), Helen Cruikshank, William Power, Willa and Edwin Muir, and many others.

Liz Lochhead And The Fairies: Context And Influence In Grimm Sisters And Dreaming Frankenstein, William Donaldson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead's period of North American travel and her response to American second-wave feminist poetics, particularly to the anthology No More Masks! (1973) and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, the treatment of myth by J.G. Frazer and Robert Graves, and the perspective on Scottish fairy tales offered by folklorists, to explore Lochhead's creative reworking of both fairy tale and classical myth in her collections Grimm Sisters (1981) and Dreaming Frankenstein (1984).

“They Act Like We Are Going To Heaven”: Pre-Arrival Information Experiences, Information Crafting And Settlement Of Immigrants In Canada, Nafiz Z. Shuva

Publications and Research

Purpose

Although there is a growing body of work on immigrants' information behavior, little is known about the pre-arrival information experiences of immigrants who consult formal information sources such as immigration agents. Drawn from a larger study on the information behavior of immigrants, this paper mainly reports the semi-structured interview findings on the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants who used formal information sources with discussion on how that affected their post-arrival settlement into Canada.

Design/methodology/approach

The study used a mixed method approach with semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and surveys (n = 205) with participants who arrived in Canada …

Divergent Self-Assembly Of Block Heterochiral Stereoisomer Arrays, Conor Louis O'Neill

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The autonomous organization of parts into ordered architectures, or biomolecular self-assembly, is an elementary natural process that defines and guides the construction and function of living organisms. This phenomenon has emerged as a potent tool for the creation of novel biomaterials, with peptide-based instances benefitting from intrinsic modularity, ease of de novo design and synthesis, biocompatibility, and chemical versatility. These properties enable methodical modifications that generate suprastructures with a wide variety of morphologies and functionalities, supporting a broad range of biomedical applications. Further, the chiral nature of amino acids permits synthesis of either left- or right-handed peptides; in recent years, …

Variables Affecting The Extraction Of Antioxidants In Cold And Hot Brew Coffee: A Review, Brian Yust, Frank Wilkinson, Niny Rao

College of Life Sciences Faculty Papers

Coffee beans are a readily available, abundant source of antioxidants used worldwide. With the increasing interest in and consumption of coffee beverages globally, research into the production, preparation, and chemical profile of coffee has also increased in recent years. A wide range of variables such as roasting temperature, coffee grind size, brewing temperature, and brewing duration can have a significant impact on the extractable antioxidant content of coffee products. While there is no single standard method for measuring all of the antioxidants found in coffee, multiple methods which introduce the coffee product to a target molecule or reagent can be …

Impact Of Marine Heatwaves On The Physiological Health Of Two Fucoid Species, Lily Burnet

The Plymouth Student Scientist

Marine Heatwaves (MHWs) are periods of high-water temperature that have become an increasingly significant threat to marine ecosystem biodiversity in recent decades with rising anthropogenic carbon driving greater severity of MHW events. The two intertidal fucoid species, Fucus serratus and Fucus vesiculosus, are keystone primary producers supporting an extensive biodiverse community of associated flora and fauna. As intertidal species, fucoids are adapted to cope with high atmospheric temperatures during exposure at low tide, however, are prone to changes in abundance, distribution, and life cycles during MHW events. Changes to fucoid communities resulting in reduced primary production and habitat biomass will …

Safety And Efficacy Of Ixoberogene Soroparvovec In Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration In The United States (Optic): A Prospective, Two-Year, Multicentre Phase 1 Study, Arshad M. Khanani, David S. Boyer, Charles C. Wykoff, Carl D. Regillo, Brandon G. Busbee, Dante Pieramici, Carl J. Danzig, Brian C. Joondeph, James C. Major, Adam Turpcu, Szilárd Kiss

Wills Eye Hospital Papers

Background

Gene therapy, successfully used in rare, monogenetic disorders, may prove to be a durable management approach for common, polygenetic conditions, including neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD). Repeated injections, oftentimes monthly, and possibly for decades, of vascular endothelial growth factor antagonists (anti-VEGF), is the standard for nAMD. We hypothesised that an in-office, intravitreal administration of ixoberogene soroparvovec (ixo-vec, formerly ADVM-022), a single-dose gene therapy encoding for the proven anti-VEGF protein, aflibercept, would transform retinal cells to continually produce aflibercept to minimise treatment burden in nAMD.

Methods

In this two-year, open-label, prospective, multicentre phase 1 study, patients with nAMD responding to …

The Function Of Ask1 In Sepsis And Stress-Induced Disorders, John Kostyak, Steven Mckenzie, Ulhas Naik

Cardeza Foundation for Hematologic Research

Apoptosis signal-regulating kinase 1 (ASK1) is a serine-threonine kinase that is ubiquitously expressed in nucleated cells and is responsible for the activation of multiple mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPK) to regulate cell stress. Activation of ASK1 via cellular stress leads to activation of downstream signaling components, activation of transcription factors, and proinflammatory cytokine production. ASK1 is also expressed in anucleate platelets and is a key player in platelet activation as it is important for signaling. Interestingly, the mechanism of ASK1 activation is cell type-dependent. In this review we will explore how ASK1 regulates a variety of cellular processes from innate immune …

Pivotal Trial Of A Deep-Learning-Based Retinal Biomarker (Reti-Cvd) In The Prediction Of Cardiovascular Disease: Data From Cmerc-Hi, Chan Joo Lee, Tyler Hyungtaek Rim, Hyun Goo Kang, Joseph Keunhong Yi, Geunyoung Lee, Marco Yu, Soo-Hyun Park, Jin-Taek Hwang, Yih-Chung Tham, Tien Yin Wong, Ching-Yu Cheng, Dong Wook Kim, Sung Soo Kim, Sungha Park

The Brown Foundation: Institute of Molecular Medicine

Objective: The potential of using retinal images as a biomarker of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk has gained significant attention, but regulatory approval of such artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms is lacking. In this regulated pivotal trial, we validated the efficacy of Reti-CVD, an AI-Software as a Medical Device (AI-SaMD), that utilizes retinal images to stratify CVD risk.

Materials and methods: In this retrospective study, we used data from the Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases Etiology Research Center-High Risk (CMERC-HI) Cohort. Cox proportional hazard model was used to estimate hazard ratio (HR) trend across the 3-tier CVD risk groups (low-, moderate-, and high-risk) …

Autocrine Igf-Ii-Associated Cancers: From A Rare Paraneoplastic Event To A Hallmark In Malignancy, Pierluigi Scalia, Ignazio R. Marino, Salvatore Asero, Giuseppe Pandini, Adda Grimberg, Wafik S. El-Deiry, Stephen J. Williams

Department of Surgery Faculty Papers

The paraneoplastic syndrome referred in the literature as non-islet-cell tumor hypoglycemia (NICTH) and extra-pancreatic tumor hypoglycemia (EPTH) was first reported almost a century ago, and the role of cancer-secreted IGF-II in causing this blood glucose-lowering condition has been widely established. The landscape emerging in the last few decades, based on molecular and cellular findings, supports a broader role for IGF-II in cancer biology beyond its involvement in the paraneoplastic syndrome. In particular, a few key findings are constantly observed during tumorigenesis, (a) a relative and absolute increase in fetal insulin receptor isoform (IR^A) content, with (b) an increase …

Enemies Of All Mankind: Piracy In The British Atlantic World, 1680 To 1730, Nicholas Knuth

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

Pirates during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries experienced the height of Atlantic piracy. The Golden Age of Piracy caused major political problems for the British overseas colonies and constituted revisions in colonial governance. Piracy during this period began as buccaneers who worked for the state during wartime as privateers and rogues during peacetime. This group changed however, by the end of the seventeenth century had transitioned into pirates, attacking any and all shipping around the colonies regarless of origin. This group forced Parliaments’ hand to act against them and implement anti-piracy laws throughout the empire. However, the War …

“Storm Of Insanity”: The Chaotic Nature Of Relief Work And Financial Compensation Following The Johnstown Flood Of 1889, Carly N. Marze

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork dam ruptured, and the resulting wall of water pummeled through the small town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing over 2,000 people. The cause was negligence by the dam’s proprietors at the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club. As bodies lay scattered throughout the Conemaugh Valley and Johnstown sat nearly twenty-feet deep in mud and debris, two questions arose: What relief work should be done to restore Johnstown? And how should this relief be financed? Lack of resources and the urgency of the work created a chaotic atmosphere in which constantly shifting procedures and disputes …

Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Computational Thinking: Enactment In Elementary Classrooms, Victoria Macann, Aman Yadav

Journal of Computer Science Integration

Technology has increasingly permeated many aspects of everyday life and this evolution raises the need for individuals to understand how the digital world works and what opportunities and risks it brings (Nouri, Zhang, Mannila & Norén, 2019). For this to be an experience for everyone, we need to rethink how we integrate computational thinking (CT) and provide teachers with tools to center their students’ identities, experiences, and cultures in the classroom. In this paper, we present two case studies of primary (elementary) teachers from a full primary (student ages 5–13) semi-rural school in the North Island of New Zealand that …

Mechanisms And Prevention Of Antibiotic Resistant Organism Spread In Hospitals, Erin P. Newcomer

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Our quest as a species to treat and prevent disease has led us to develop medical care that would have been inconceivable even one century ago. However, as we learn to overcome previous roadblocks, new hurdles that we hadn’t even considered continue to present themselves. Once we learned to understand the germ theory of disease, we sought treatments for infectious diseases, which led us to the development of antibiotics. Antibiotics are responsible for saving countless lives and have ushered in the advances in other fields of medicine like cancer treatment and surgery. Now, antibiotic resistance threatens our ability to treat …

The Development And Validation Of Novel Imaging Biomarkers For Uterine Contraction, Cervix And Placenta In Pregnancy, Wenjie Wu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Annually, nearly half a million neonates in the United States and 15 million globally are born preterm, defined as prior to 37 completed weeks of gestation. These births present elevated risks of neonatal mortality and long-term neurological deficits. The predominant obstetric precursors of preterm birth (PTB) include spontaneous preterm labor (45%), medically-indicated deliveries (30%), and preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM, 25%). Each precursor is associated with distinct physiological or structural alterations such as uterine contractions, placental dysfunction, or cervical insufficiency. Current methodologies for monitoring uterine contractions, such as intrauterine pressure catheters and electrohysterography, possess limitations in spatial resolution, coverage, …

Improving And Integrating Quantitative Single Cell Spatial Biology For Theranostic Medicine, Peng Lu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Disease states are the result of a complex interplay of many different cell types interacting in close proximity in the context of often heterogeneous tissues. Alpha particles are drawing intense research and clinical interest because of their potent cytotoxic effects and their short path lengths. Analyzing the dose distribution and tissue micro-environment for alpha therapy plays a key role in predicting the efficacy of this targeted radiotherapy. However, to date there have been no direct on-tissue analytical methods for alpha dose distributions and the corresponding tissue microenvironments. Therefore, we have developed a pipeline to overcome this limitation by utilizing quantitative …

Para-Infectious Brain Injury In Covid-19 Persists At Follow-Up Despite Attenuated Cytokine And Autoantibody Responses, Benedict D Michael, Cordelia Dunai, Edward J Needham, Kukatharmini Tharmaratnam, Robyn Williams, Yun Huang, Sarah A Boardman, Jordan J Clark, Parul Sharma, Krishanthi Subramaniam, Greta K Wood, Ceryce Collie, Richard Digby, Alexander Ren, Emma Norton, Maya Leibowitz, Soraya Ebrahimi, Andrew Fower, Hannah Fox, Esteban Tato, Mark A Ellul, Geraint Sunderland, Marie Held, Claire Hetherington, Franklyn N Egbe, Alish Palmos, Kathy Stirrups, Alexander Grundmann, Anne-Cecile Chiollaz, Jean-Charles Sanchez, James P Stewart, Michael Griffiths, Tom Solomon, Gerome Breen, Alasdair J Coles, Nathalie Kingston, John R Bradley, Patrick F Chinnery, Jonathan Cavanagh, Sarosh R Irani, Angela Vincent, J Kenneth Baillie, Peter J Openshaw, Malcolm G Semple, Covid-Cns Consortium, Isaric4c Investigators, Leonie S Taams, David K Menon

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

To understand neurological complications of COVID-19 better both acutely and for recovery, we measured markers of brain injury, inflammatory mediators, and autoantibodies in 203 hospitalised participants; 111 with acute sera (1-11 days post-admission) and 92 convalescent sera (56 with COVID-19-associated neurological diagnoses). Here we show that compared to 60 uninfected controls, tTau, GFAP, NfL, and UCH-L1 are increased with COVID-19 infection at acute timepoints and NfL and GFAP are significantly higher in participants with neurological complications. Inflammatory mediators (IL-6, IL-12p40, HGF, M-CSF, CCL2, and IL-1RA) are associated with both altered consciousness and markers of brain injury. Autoantibodies are more common …

Cohesion: A Core Outcome Set For The Treatment Of Neonatal Encephalopathy, Fiona A. Quirke, Shabina Ariff, Malcolm R. Battin, Caitlin Bernard, Linda Biesty, Frank H. Bloomfield, Mandy Daly, Elaine Finucane, Maira Niaz, Farhana Tabassum

Department of Paediatrics and Child Health

Background: Heterogeneity in outcomes reported in trials of interventions for the treatment of neonatal encephalopathy (NE) makes evaluating the effectiveness of treatments difficult. Developing a core outcome set for NE treatment would enable researchers to measure and report the same outcomes in future trials. This would minimise waste, ensure relevant outcomes are measured and enable evidence synthesis. Therefore, we aimed to develop a core outcome set for treating NE.
Methods: Outcomes identified from a systematic review of the literature and interviews with parents were prioritised by stakeholders (n = 99 parents/caregivers, n = 101 healthcare providers, and n = 22 …

First Destination Survey 2023: For Degrees Awarded December 2022-August 2023, Hart Career Center, Illinois Wesleyan University

First Destination Survey

No abstract provided.

Lead In Paint-Contaminated Residential Soils With Varying Physicochemical Properties From Three Large Us Cities: Assessment Of Geochemical Forms And Recommendations On Amendments For Immobilization, Hadeer Saleh, Dibyendu Sarkar, Washington Braida, Steve Larson, Rupali Datta

Michigan Tech Publications

Lead in yard soils has been recognized as the principal source of excess lead absorption among young children. The hazard imposed by soil lead is dependent on the geochemical forms of lead in soils. Soil properties such as pH, soil organic matter, clay, and carbonate content influence the geochemical forms of lead in soil. This study was conducted to investigate the correlation between soil properties and the geochemical speciation of lead in lead paint-contaminated residential soils from three major US cities. A comprehensive field survey was conducted, involving the collection of soils from ten houses in each of the cities: …

Enhancing Diversity And Inclusion In Computer Science Undergraduate Programs: The Role Of Admissions, Ouldooz Baghban Karimi, Giulia Toti, Mirela Gutica, Rebecca Robinson, Lisa Zhang, James Paterson, Peggy Lindner, Michael O'Dea

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Despite continued efforts to further the participation of women in Computer Science (CS), progress has been limited during the past decades. Recent efforts have been focused on recruitment and retention, with a notable gap in exploring the impact of admissions processes on diversity and inclusion. Through an extensive literature review, contextual analysis of public admissions data from 40 universities across four regions around the world, and qualitative and quantitative analysis on surveys and interviews, we explored the role of admissions in enhancing diversity and inclusion in CS undergraduate programs. Our findings highlight the role of financials, the possible positive effects …

Decentralized Computing For Reliable Home Automation, Rahav Dor

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Smart homes are distributed systems that should provide reliable home automation services. Distributed controllers have been used to improve the reliability of smart homes. However, despite the redundancy in controllers, the reliability of smart homes is hindered by the unreliable network infrastructure comprising home Wi-Fi and low-power wireless networks. As a result, smart homes cannot be trusted with much more than casual automation to date. This dissertation identifies the limitations of traditional fault-tolerant approaches that require inter-controller coordination over an unreliable network infrastructure. A new class of decentralized control paradigm named Banyan, with fully autonomous controllers, is introduced by this …

Data-Driven Approaches To System Analysis And Control Design, Minh Vu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In this thesis, we study the integration of data and computational methods in nonlinear system analysis and control design. In the first part of this thesis, we develop a constructive framework for designing a set of candidate functions from data such that desired control-theoretic conditions are satisfied. This new design framework is aimed at offering a general data-driven approach to a number of problems in systems and control, including stability analysis, stabilization, and safety-critical control designs. The second half of the thesis focuses on the specific problem of designing a point-to-point steering, which is often considered in many practical control …

Interpretable Deep Learning Via Sparse Representation For Protein-Dna Interactions, Shane Kuei-Hsien Chu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

A central theme in modeling in regulatory genomics is to consider what representation is suited for DNA sequences that give the most helpful information. Traditionally, there are k-mers, position-weight-matrices, parametric statistical models like Hidden Markov models, and, more recently, deep neural network. In this work, we introduce sparse representations as a principled framework for problems in regulatory genomics. We show that sparse representation is a framework that allows us to build techniques to answer challenging inferential questions in regulatory genomics. Leveraging sparse representations, we reveal that gapped and long motifs are prevalent in in-vivo datasets like ChIP-Seq, often corresponding to …

Deep Representation Learning For Clinical Predictive Models, Bing Xue

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In the era of digital health, Electronic Health Records (EHR) integrate clinical data from various sources, presenting a wealth of information across multiple modalities. While this abundance allows for comprehensive patient characterization, the intricate nature and high dimensionality of EHR data pose challenges for clinicians, particularly in the dynamic landscape of clinical decision-making. This dissertation delves into the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to automate risk identification and provide decision support in clinical settings. The research unfolds in three key contributions. First, we investigate ML's potential in constructing a multi-modal framework for generating informative risk assessments. …

The Mechanobiology Of Cell Plasticity, Yuan Hong

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The cell is a sophisticated machine, integrating chemical and physical inputs to decide upon the mechanobiological outputs that the body requires every second, in cardiomyocytes that make heartbeats, in fibroblasts that heal wounds, and in sarcomeres that contract muscles. Malfunction of mechanotransduction or mechanical inputs is implicated in diseases such as fibrosis, cancers, and cardiomyopathies, and a pressing quest is underway to unravel the intricacies of how mechanical force orchestrates the activation of cells. This dissertation explores these fundamental mechanisms of cell activation using integrated mathematical and engineered cell culture models. The work begins with the discovery that the directionality …

Desmoglein-2 As A Cancer Modulator: Friend Or Foe?, Kay Myo Min, Charlie Ffrench, Barbara Mcclure, Michael Ortiz, Emma Dorward, Michael Samuel, Lisa Ebert, Mỹ Mahoney, Claudine Bonder

Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Cancer Biology Faculty Papers

Desmoglein-2 (DSG2) is a calcium-binding single pass transmembrane glycoprotein and a member of the large cadherin family. Until recently, DSG2 was thought to only function as a cell adhesion protein embedded within desmosome junctions designed to enable cells to better tolerate mechanical stress. However, additional roles for DSG2 outside of desmosomes are continuing to emerge, particularly in cancer. Herein, we review the current literature on DSG2 in cancer and detail its impact on biological functions such as cell adhesion, proliferation, migration, invasion, intracellular signaling, extracellular vesicle release and vasculogenic mimicry. An increased understanding of the diverse repertoire of the biological …

How To Peer Review A Neurology Education Manuscript, Daniel G Di Luca, Steven M Lazar, Preeta Gupta, Marie Charmaine S Lukban, Cole Crowson, Dara V F Albert, Jeremy J Moeller, Andres Fernandez, Andrew M Southerland, Zachary London

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Peer review is an essential process in scientific research, ensuring the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and suitability of manuscripts for publication. Neurology education research differs from biomedical clinical research in several ways. These differences encompass specific paradigms, the use of theoretical frameworks, and different methodological approaches. Despite the high number of studies and journal publications on neurology education, there is a dearth of resources and guidance on how to perform a formal review on this specific literature. This article aims to review the distinctive features of neurology education from clinical research while proposing an organizational framework and model for performing peer reviews …

Education Research: Virtual Patient Management Conference For Epilepsy Surgery In The Post-Covid-19 Era: An Educational Perspective, Thomas Pecha, Sharonya Shetty, Abhishek Kengen, Jay Gavvala, Atul Maheshwari

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The primary objective of this study was to assess the potential educational value of a virtual patient management conference (PMC) with the introduction of inclusive anonymous polling at a comprehensive epilepsy center. The secondary objective was to evaluate differences between faculty and trainee polling results.

METHODS: Two online surveys were sent 1 year apart seeking opinions about a transition to virtual PMC and completed by virtual PMC faculty participants (including representatives from neurology, neurosurgery, and neuropsychology). One online survey was sent to trainees (medical students, residents, and fellows) to assess the educational value of the conference. Anonymous …

Impact Of Covid-19 Pandemic On Marketing Of Education, Shreekant Joag

Journal of Global Awareness

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many schools to partially or totally switch to remote communication methods for delivering education in the years 2020-2021. It is believed that forced compliance with unfamiliar and even unpreferred modes of behavior can have a profound and lasting impact on people’s attitudes and opinions toward the behavior itself because of first-hand exposure and experience. It is, therefore, possible that this experience with remote teaching and learning could have materially changed both instructors’ as well as students’ attitudes toward remote delivery of education. Such changed attitudes may predict their future choices and behavior.

This paper will present …