Digital Commons Network^™

Phosphorus Fate And Management On The Somerset Levels And Moors Ramsar Ditch Systems, Ry Crocker

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences Theses

Fundamental to all life, phosphorus is an essential nutrient and, contrastingly, a significant threat to surface water biodiversity globally as one of the most common causes of eutrophication in surface waters worldwide. Freshwater wetland ditches afflicted by these conditions undergo a shift from primarily submerged aquatic vegetation to algae or duckweed dominance, leading to excessive shading and anoxic conditions. Phosphorus, from both point (e.g., wastewater treatment works) and diffuse (largely agricultural runoff) sources, is currently the central reason for failure in the majority of surface water bodies in England to meet required water quality guidelines. Historic data indicate that surface …

Going Back-To-The-Land In The Anthropocene: A More-Than-Human Journey Into Anarchist Geography, Carlotta Molfese

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences Theses

This thesis is a theoretical and empirical journey into the more-than-human worlds of countercultural back-to-the-land farmers: radical environmentalists who migrate to rural places and take up farming as a way of living. It investigates their everyday life and relations to the land as a key dimension of their political radicalism and it interrogates the transformative potential of a back-to-the-land way of living. It does so by examining their lived experience of (post)migration and by paying attention to their affective experiences, encounters and everyday doings with the land and the non-human beings, objects and forces that are enrolled and shape their …

An Isotopic Analysis Of Carbon Dynamics In Sphagnum Peat, Jasper Michael Newman

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences Theses

Methane and carbon dioxide produced in peatlands can be held temporarily in dissolved surface waters and accessible to aquatic plants. The primary peat building plant in northern peatlands, Sphagnum moss, grows in these dissolved carbon rich waters. Understanding Sphagnum carbon cycles is key for radiocarbon dating, peatland restoration, and modelling of methane release from warming peatlands globally. This combined surface and multi‐proxy palaeoenvironmental study challenges common assumptions about the dissolved gas cycling in this semi‐aquatic environment. The Sphagnum associated methanotrophic communities within the water filled hyaline cells have commonly been linked to unusual 13C‐depleted measurements of Sphagnum carbon isotope ratios. …

Menstrual Justice: A Human Rights Vision For Australia, Mike Armour, Dani Barrington, Helen Connolly, Beth Goldblatt, Elizabeth Hill, Danielle Howe, Margaret E. Johnson, Minnie King, Nina Lansbury, Meredith Nash, Linda Steele, Jane M. Ussher

All Faculty Scholarship

In the past year alone, news reports have shown how menstrual injustice is linked to gender inequality, a lack of economic opportunity, poor health outcomes, and human rights violations. Here is a small sampling of the unjust treatment of women and other people who menstruate: locked bathrooms at schools, inadequate supply of free period products, harmful menstruation-avoidance options for athletes, the human and economic costs of the lack of menstruation and menopause employment leave policies, and the mistreatment of people imprisoned who menstruate.

To improve women’s equality, we need menstrual justice. Menstrual justice is the achievement of dignity, liberty and …

Characterisation Of Caspase-6-Dependent Regulatory Mechanisms Of Sqstm1/P62 Droplet-Based Autophagy, Evelina Valionyte

Peninsula Medical School Theses

p62, otherwise known as SQSTM1, is the most characterised selective autophagy receptor essential for autophagic cargo recognition, capture and degradation. p62 and its cargo form liquid-liquid phase-separated droplets which operate as assembly platforms for the formation of autophagosomes. It is poorly understood how physiological and pathological conditions modulate p62 droplet-based autophagy. In this study, the effects of cellular toxicity upon the regulation of p62 droplet-based autophagy were investigated. This study discovered that the inflammatory toxicity promotes caspase-6 to cleave p62 at a novel site D256. As the C-terminal cleavage product was undetected via western blotting rendering it unstable, the attention …

Molecular Biology Of Peripheral Nerve Regeneration: Expression And Role Of Netrin-1, Dcc And Runx2, Lolita Singh

Peninsula Medical School Theses

Damage to the peripheral nerves causes a series of molecular, cellular, and structural changes critical to initiating a successful regenerative process involving degeneration, inflammation, axon re-growth and innervation of the denervated target, and finally functional recovery. In this thesis I sought to study the expression and role of an axon guidance molecule - Netrin-1 in peripheral nerve repair. Using a Schwann cell-specific Netrin-1 knockout mouse model, I showed an increased disorganisation and misdirection of re-growing axons within the nerve bridge following transection injury. However, this did not affect the number of axons innervating the distal nerve. Moreover, functional recovery was …

Cerebellar Dysfunction In Rodent Models With Dystonia, Tremor, And Ataxia, Meike E Van Der Heijden, Roy V Sillitoe

Duncan NRI Faculty and Staff Publications

Dystonia is a movement disorder characterized by involuntary co- or over-contractions of the muscles, which results in abnormal postures and movements. These symptoms arise from the pathophysiology of a brain-wide dystonia network. There is mounting evidence suggesting that the cerebellum is a central node in this network. For example, manipulations that target the cerebellum cause dystonic symptoms in mice, and cerebellar neuromodulation reduces these symptoms. Although numerous findings provide insight into dystonia pathophysiology, they also raise further questions. Namely, how does cerebellar pathophysiology cause the diverse motor abnormalities in dystonia, tremor, and ataxia? Here, we describe recent work in rodents …

Key Principles For The Intergovernmental Science–Policy Panel On Chemicals And Waste, Marlene Ågerstrand, Kenneth Arinaitwe, Thomas Backhaus, Richardo O. Barra, Miriam L. Diamond, Joan O. Grimalt, Ksenia Groh, Faith Kandie, Perihan Binnur Kurt-Karakus, Robert J. Letcher, Rainer Lohmann, Rodrigo O. Meire, Temilola Olueyi, Andreas Schäfer, Mochamad Septiono, Gabriel Sigmund, Anna Soehl, Temitope O. Sogbanmu, Noriyuki Suzuki, Marta Venier, Penny Vlahos, Martin Scheringer

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Calibration Of Perfluorinated Alkyl Acid Uptake Rates By A Tube Passive Sampler In Water, Matthew Dunn, Jitka Becanova, Jarod Snook, Bridger Ruyle, Rainer Lohmann

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of 4000+ man-made compounds of great concern due to their environmental ubiquity and adverse effects. Despite general interest, few reliable detection tools for integrative passive sampling of PFAS in water are available. A microporous polyethylene tube with a hydrophilic–lipophilic balance sorbent could serve as a flow-resistant passive sampler for PFAS. The tube’s sampling rate, R_s, was predicted based on either partitioning and diffusion or solely diffusion. At 15 ^°C, the laboratory-measured R_s for perfluorohexanoic acid of 100 ± 81 mL day^–1 was better predicted by a partitioning …

Nitrifying Microorganisms Linked To Biotransformation Of Perfluoroalkyl Sulfonamido Precursors From Legacy Aqueous Film-Forming Foams, Bridger J. Ruyle, Lara Schultes, Denise A. Akob, Cassandra R. Harris, Michelle M. Lorah, Simon Votja, Jitka Becanova, Shelley Mccann, Heidi M. Pickard, Ann Pearson, Rainer Lohmann, Chad D. Vecitis, Elsie M. Sunderland

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Drinking water supplies across the United States have been contaminated by firefighting and fire-training activities that use aqueous film-forming foams (AFFF) containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Much of the AFFF is manufactured using electrochemical fluorination by 3M. Precursors with six perfluorinated carbons (C6) and non-fluorinated amine substituents make up approximately one-third of the PFAS in 3M AFFF. C6 precursors can be transformed through nitrification (microbial oxidation) of amine moieties into perfluorohexane sulfonate (PFHxS), a compound of regulatory concern. Here, we report biotransformation of the most abundant C6 sulfonamido precursors in 3M AFFF with available commercial standards (FHxSA, PFHxSAm, and …

Glacial Southern Ocean Expansion Recorded In Foraminifera-Bound Nitrogen Isotopes From The Agulhas Plateau During The Mid-Pleistocene Transition, B. A. Marcks, T. P. Dos Santos, D. V.O. Lessa, A. Cartagena-Sierra, M. A. Berke, A. Starr, I. R. Hall, R. P. Kelly, Rebecca S. Robinson

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

The emergence of 100-Kyr glacial cycles (The Mid-Pleistocene Transition [MPT]) is attributed in part to slower global overturning circulation and iron stimulation of biological carbon drawdown in the Southern Ocean. We present foraminifera-bound nitrogen isotope values and polar planktic foraminifera abundances from the Agulhas Plateau that show that increases in biogenic sediment accumulation coincide with northward migrations of the Subtropical Frontal Zone (STFZ) and elevated foraminifera-bound nitrogen isotope values during MPT glacial episodes. The nitrogen isotope values of two planktic foraminifera species, Globigerina bulloides and Globorotalia inflata show remarkable coherence amongst the sea surface temperature gradient between the STFZ and …

Uptake Of Per- And Polyfluoroalkyl Substances By Fish, Mussel, And Passive Samplers In Mobile-Laboratory Exposures Using Groundwater From A Contamination Plume At A Historical Fire Training Area, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Larry B. Barber, Heidi M. Pickard, David A. Alvarez, Jitka Becanova, Steffanie H. Keefe, Denise R. Leblanc, Rainer Lohmann, Jeffrey A. Steevens, Alan M. Vajda

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Aqueous film-forming foams historically were used during fire training activities on Joint Base Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and created an extensive per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) groundwater contamination plume. The potential for PFAS bioconcentration from exposure to the contaminated groundwater, which discharges to surface water bodies, was assessed with mobile-laboratory experiments using groundwater from the contamination plume and a nearby reference location. The on-site continuous-flow 21-day exposures used male and female fathead minnows, freshwater mussels, polar organic chemical integrative samplers (POCIS), and polyethylene tube samplers (PETS) to evaluate biotic and abiotic uptake. The composition of the PFAS-contaminated groundwater was complex and …

Long Distance Dispersal And Oceanographic Fronts Shape The Connectivity Of The Keystone Sponge Phakellia Ventilabrum In The Deep Northeast Atlantic, Sergi Taboada, Connie Whiting, Shuangqiang Wang, Pilar Rios, Andrew J. Davies, Furu Mienis, Ellen Kenchington, Paco Cárdenas, Alex Cranston, Vasiliki Koutsouveli, Javier Cristobo, Hans Tore Rapp, Jim Drewery, Francisco Baldó, Christine Morrow, Bernard Picton, Joana R. Xavier, Maria Belén Arias, Carlos Leiva, Ana Riesgo

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Little is known about dispersal in deep-sea ecosystems, especially for sponges, which are abundant ecosystem engineers. Understanding patterns of gene flow in deep-sea sponges is essential, especially in areas where rising pressure from anthropogenic activities makes difficult to combine management and conservation. Here, we combined population genomics and oceanographic modelling to understand how Northeast Atlantic populations (Cantabrian Sea to Norway) of the deep-sea sponge Phakellia ventilabrum are connected. The analysis comprised ddRADseq derived SNP datasets of 166 individuals collected from 57 sampling stations from 17 different areas, including two Marine Protected Areas, one Special Area of Conservation and other areas …

Consolidating Port Decarbonisation Implementation : Concept, Pathways, Barriers, Solutions, And Opportunities, A.S. Alamoush, D. Dalaklis, F. Ballini, A.I. Ölcer

Articles

No abstract provided.

Examining An Information System (Is) Solution To Increase Uk University Students’ Engagement During Lecturing Activities, A. Dalaklis, A. Dalaklis, D. Dalaklis

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Tau In Epidermal Stratification And Differentiation And Its Implications In Skin Cancer, Charlotte Illsley

Other Faculty of Health Theses

Background: Microtubule associated proteins are a group of proteins well characterised for their role in the stabilisation and polymerisation of microtubules, but they have been increasingly demonstrated to have a more diverse role within cells. Tau is a microtubule associated protein, well studied for its pathological role in Alzheimer’s disease. Recent studies have provided evidence that tau is also expressed in the epidermal compartment of the skin. However, the precise roles of tau during epidermal stratification and differentiation are currently unknown. Aims: This study aims to investigate the role of tau in epidermal stratification and differentiation and its function in …

Octopus Optics: A Cross-Disciplinary Investigation Of Human Visual Bias In Narrative With Corresponding Writing Experiments Using Animal Focalisation, Stephanie Jane Cussans Moran

School of Art, Design and Architecture Theses

What is it like to be a human? If an octopus wrote an anthropology based on human depictions of octopuses then how might that reconfigure this existential question? This thesis addresses the posthuman problem of visual bias in animal storytelling practices by experimentally adopting the perspective of another highly visual animal - the octopus - through fiction. It seeks to question, find the edges, and feel the limitations of human representations of other animals and asks what doing so might say about our own naturalcultural perceptions and interpretations. In attending particularly to opticality in Anglophone storytelling, the thesis investigates ways …

Building Immersive Environments Towards Non-Human Models Of Organizing Against Global Crisis, Luis Andre Varela Reis

School of Art, Design and Architecture Theses

The wolfanddotcom series of artworks seeks to establish new knowledge embedded in its practice within a nascent field combining the areas of aesthetic computation, interactive electronic arts, videogames, mythology, biology, human/non-human computer interfaces. Wolfanddotcom's research leads investigations on bio-electronic and imaginary arts alloyed with a mythological and non-human turn, mainly through the creation of dynamic art-sci constructs, in the form of mythological videogames and bio-electronic aggregates, by establishing multiple lines of flight onto a creative framework, seeking novel, procedural, immersive, cathartic and bio-electronic methods. With a final purpose of exploring new electronic-based arts’ aesthetic regions, unexampled connections between generative (Eno) …

The Postnatural Animal In Contemporary Art, Paul Finnegan

School of Art, Design and Architecture Theses

The thesis uses art practice as a research method to propose novel characterisations of animal life. These characterisations aim to challenge an organicist image of non-human animals. The thesis considers animal bodies and behaviours as subject to aesthetic judgments that are underpinned by deeper ontological and epistemological commitments as to relations between nature and society, in which to be categorised as the former entails a series of privations in relation to the latter – the absence of freedom, subjectivity and creativity. Scholarly research on the history of the perception and conception of animal life within modernity, and subsequent challenges made …

Humanity Undone, A Practice Led Enquiry Into Self-Injury, Karen Abadie

School of Art, Design and Architecture Theses

This thesis enquires into my lived experience of self-injury (cutting my own skin), asking to what extent can moving image, sound and performance in the context of art installation reveal an understanding of the processes of self-injury. I employ an embodied onto-epistemological methodology that blends artistic enquiry with active engagement with phenomenological and new materialist feminist theory. This investigation reveals a dynamic yet subtle relationship between the body-as-object and the body-as- subject, as initially described by Husserl as Leib and Körper (1990). I use 16mm film and performance in a haptic immersive installation environment to articulate these dynamic subtleties. Merleau-Ponty …

Casting A Line To The Land: Narratologies Of Embodied Rituals And Connectivity To Place, Zoe Latham

School of Art, Design and Architecture Theses

This research argues for a re-conceptualisation and extension of place within architectural praxis that is reflective of broader discussions of meaning and environmental experience. This study examines the alignment between place and ritual theory as a way to better understand phenomenon that inform a greater connectivity between embodied and meaningful experiences with the environment. This will be explored through the act of fly fishing. Fly-fishing is relevant as the focus of the study owing in part to the author’s own experience as a fly angler. The relationship between the act of fly fishing, being part of nature and being in …

Multicultural And Social Justice Counseling Within The Scope Of Rehabilitation Counseling, Jeong Han Kim, Kayi Ntinda, Christopher Townsend, Kenneth Thomas, Dong Hun Lee, Cameron Ortega, Hee Jung Yu

School of Rehabilitation Services & Counseling Faculty Publications

Historically, people with disabilities are a marginalized cultural group in that their lived world is less well represented in mainstream services. The rehabilitation counseling profession has the goal to prioritize and empower people with disabilities for thriving in their personal and community lives. However, cultures exist within social systems often characterized by inequities, obliging a need to go beyond multicultural counseling to address social injustices that would occur to populations with historical disadvantages such as people with disabilities. The present study discusses the multicultural counseling movement and its impact in the field of rehabilitation counseling. The study first introduces the …

A Study Of Verbal Rumination, Relationships, Stress And Identity On Health Communication In Collegiate Athletics, Landon Mary Ellen Kemp

Dissertations and Theses

College athletes are a unique group of individuals as they face many positive and negative challenges when competing in a collegiate sport. Verbal rumination is repetitive talk about a particular issue, accompanied by adverse effects for an individual. Verbal rumination is a common strategy athletes use to cope with difficulties along with managing challenging situations in their athletic program. To explore factors that might inspire or impede verbal rumination in collegiate athletics, the present study examines the quality of coach and teammate relationships, perceived stress and athlete identity. Results revealed the impact of relationships between coaches and athletes in respect …

Application Of Hierarchical Species Distribution Models To Avian Species Of South Dakota And The Upper Missouri River Basin, Reza Goljani Amirkhiz

Dissertations and Theses

Recognizing the distributional patterns of species can inform management actions and increase scientific knowledge about species. Habitat Suitability Models (HSMs) are valuable tools in modeling species’ niches and effects of climate change and anthropogenic and natural disturbances on species’ distributions and abundances. In this dissertation, I expanded the application of hierarchical HSMs for a rare bird (Virginia’s warbler) and an economically valuable bird (ring-necked pheasant) in South Dakota. Also, we developed multiscale HSMs for grassland birds in the Upper Missouri River Basin (UMRB) to quantify current habitat associations and predict the influences of climate and landcover change associated with the …

Graduate Catalog 2023-2024, Southwestern Oklahoma State University

Graduate Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Modular Pandemic Hospitals: A Challenge For Living, Mona Y. Shedid, Eman M. O. Mokhtar

Mansoura Engineering Journal

Over the last several months, the COVID-19 pandemic has globally affected millions of humans and has changed every aspect of our daily life. Hospitals play a major role to combat this pandemic disease however; they are struggling as they are confronted with sudden influx of patients and are jammed to capacity with a lack of available beds and treatment spaces. In managing this health crisis, a rapid resolution concerning our perception and future hospital designs needs to change to save as many lives as possible. According to a pilot study with experts in architecture, four problems during the design of …

Cooperative Deep Q -Learning Framework For Environments Providing Image Feedback, Krishnan Raghavan, Vignesh Narayanan, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Publications

In this article, we address two key challenges in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) setting, sample inefficiency, and slow learning, with a dual-neural network (NN)-driven learning approach. In the proposed approach, we use two deep NNs with independent initialization to robustly approximate the action-value function in the presence of image inputs. In particular, we develop a temporal difference (TD) error-driven learning (EDL) approach, where we introduce a set of linear transformations of the TD error to directly update the parameters of each layer in the deep NN. We demonstrate theoretically that the cost minimized by the EDL regime is an approximation …

Adaptive Critic Network For Person Tracking Using 3d Skeleton Data, Joseph G. Zalameda, Alex Glandon, Khan M. Iftekharuddin, Mohammad S. Alam (Ed.), Vijayan K. Asari (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Analysis of human gait using 3-dimensional co-occurrence skeleton joints extracted from Lidar sensor data has been shown a viable method for predicting person identity. The co-occurrence based networks rely on the spatial changes between frames of each joint in the skeleton data sequence. Normally, this data is obtained using a Lidar skeleton extraction method to estimate these co-occurrence features from raw Lidar frames, which can be prone to incorrect joint estimations when part of the body is occluded. These datasets can also be time consuming and expensive to collect and typically offer a small number of samples for training and …

Transfer Learning Using Infrared And Optical Full Motion Video Data For Gender Classification, Alexander M. Glandon, Joe Zalameda, Khan M. Iftekharuddin, Gabor F. Fulop (Ed.), David Z. Ting (Ed.), Lucy L. Zheng (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This work is a review and extension of our ongoing research in human recognition analysis using multimodality motion sensor data. We review our work on hand crafted feature engineering for motion capture skeleton (MoCap) data, from the Air Force Research Lab for human gender followed by depth scan based skeleton extraction using LIDAR data from the Army Night Vision Lab for person identification. We then build on these works to demonstrate a transfer learning sensor fusion approach for using the larger MoCap and smaller LIDAR data for gender classification.

Long-Range Aceo Phenomena In Microfluidic Channel, Diganta Dutta, Keifer Smith, Xavier Palmer

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Microfluidic devices are increasingly utilized in numerous industries, including that of medicine, for their abilities to pump and mix fluid at a microscale. Within these devices, microchannels paired with microelectrodes enable the mixing and transportation of ionized fluid. The ionization process charges the microchannel and manipulates the fluid with an electric field. Although complex in operation at the microscale, microchannels within microfluidic devices are easy to produce and economical. This paper uses simulations to convey helpful insights into the analysis of electrokinetic microfluidic device phenomena. The simulations in this paper use the Navier–Stokes and Poisson Nernst–Planck equations solved using COMSOL …