Digital Commons Network^™

Integrating Behavior And Genomics To Understand Sensory Integration In Cnidarians, Sydney Birch

Doctoral Dissertations

Class Hydrozoa belongs to Phylum Cnidaria which occupies a key phylogenetic position in animal evolution. Phylum Cnidaria, which includes animals such as jellyfish, sea anemones, corals, and hydrozoans, is the evolutionary sister lineage to bilaterians. My Ph.D. research is focused on understanding how hydrozoans integrate sensory information from the environment at the genetic level and how that mediates an organismal behavioral response by investigating three closely related hydrozoan species: Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, Hydra vulgaris, and Ectopleura crocea. Many of the studies on cnidarian sensory ecology have focused on adult stages or anthozoan species (sea anemones and corals) leaving a lack of …

Answering Topical Information Needs Using Neural Entity-Oriented Information Retrieval And Extraction, Shubham Chatterjee

Doctoral Dissertations

In the modern world, search engines are an integral part of human lives. The field of Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with finding material (usually documents) of an unstructured nature (usually text) that satisfies an information need (query) from within large collections (usually stored on computers). The search engine then displays a ranked list of results relevant to our query. Traditional document retrieval algorithms match a query to a document using the overlap of words in both. However, the last decade has seen the focus shifting to leveraging the rich semantic information available in the form of entities. Entities are …

Environmental Implications Of Ubiquitous Dicarboxylic Acid Aerosol And Biomass Burning Generated Reactive Nitrogen, Jackson Hart Kaspari

Doctoral Dissertations

Aerosols impact our lives in many different ways, including the health of our species,visibility and the global climate. In terms of climate effects, large uncertainty still exists surrounding the combined influence of aerosols on the Earth’s radiative budget. This highlights the importance of research that seeks to better understand atmospheric aerosols and associated gas phase compounds, as advances in the field will allow for the production of more accurate climate models. In laboratory studies, great variability in reported deliquescence relative humidity (DRH) warrants the need for new methods of analysis. A custom built electrobalance with variable active particle humidity control …

The Banner - V. 157, No. 1 - (January 2022), Christian Reformed Church In North America

The Banner

No abstract provided.

Thinking Beyond Bacterial Infection: A Case Of Cutaneous Blastomycosis, Mehakmeet Bhatia, Vivek Kak, Parth Patel, Alexander A. Slota

Hematology/Oncology Articles

Blastomycosis is caused by Blastomyces dermatitidis, a dimorphic fungus that primarily causes pulmonary disease. Cutaneous blastomycosis is infrequent and tends to be misdiagnosed given its similar presentation to other cutaneous fungal infections and malignancies. A 51-year-old woman presented with a two-month history of disfiguring nasal lesions. The patient had a past medical history of cervical cancer which was currently in remission. Social history was significant for frequent travel throughout the United States as a truck driver, including the Midwest. The patient had a non-purulent verrucous plaque on her right nare, which was painless and mildly pruritic. Superficial cultures grew …

2022-2023 Halmos College Of Arts And Sciences Graduate Program Catalog, Nova Southeastern University

Halmos College of Arts and Sciences Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

The Worth Of The Black Disabled Body: An Excavation Of Black Disabled Legal History, Alyssa Mcleod

Undergraduate Research Awards

Slave law was overwhelmingly concerned with the state of individual bodies, from the earliest colonial iterations of race-based statutes through to the end of the antebellum era, becoming a key index in shaping the concept of race from that point forward. In this time, white legislators were trying to answer several burgeoning questions including: Are enslaved bodies inherently damaged, broken, criminal, or worthy of manumission? The answer, it seems, is that every enslaved person’s value was determined almost strictly on the value of their labor, and therefore, their ability to work (and thus, by implication, their value as salable property). …

Rabbits And Hogs And Bears, Oh My! Monstrous Births And Control Over Pregnant Bodies, Elizabeth Klein

Undergraduate Research Awards

Monstrous birth stories occupied early modern European society between the 16th and 18th centuries. These stories depicted gruesome and fantastical births influenced by the imaginations and ill virtue of pregnant women, and the tales were the subject of much interest within the intellectual and medical community. The discussion of these births that took place among the male members of such communities were particularly revelatory of the way female bodies were viewed and controlled in early modern Europe. These conversations are evidenced in the writings of 16th and 17th-century European physicians about the power of women’s imaginations over their pregnant bodies, …

Recalibrating Qualified Immunity: How Tanzin V. Tanvir, Taylor V. Riojas, And Mccoy V. Alamu Signal The Supreme Court's Discomfort With The Doctrine Of Qualified Immunity, Patrick Jaicomo, Anya Bidwell

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

In December 2020, the United States Supreme Court issued its most important decision on qualified immunity since Harlow v. Fitzgerald, and the issue in the case did not even involve the doctrine. In the Court’s unanimous opinion in Tanzin v. Tanvir, which dealt with the interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Justice Thomas explicitly distanced the Court from the very type of policy reasoning used to create qualified immunity. He also embraced the availability of damages claims against government officials as historically justified and often necessary to vindicate individual rights and to check the government’s power. The …

Risk-Based Sentencing And The Principles Of Punishment, Christopher Lewis

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Risk-based sentencing regimes use an offender’s statistical likelihood of returning to crime in the future to determine the amount of time he or she spends in prison. Many criminal justice reformers see this as a fair and efficient way to shrink the size of the incarcerated population, while minimizing sacrifices to public safety. But risk-based sentencing is indefensible even (and perhaps especially) by the lights of the theory that supposedly justifies it. Instead of trying to cut time in prison for those who are least likely to reoffend, officials should focus sentencing reform on the least advantaged who tend to …

Fetal Protection Laws And The "Personhood" Problem: Toward A Relational Theory Of Fetal Life And Reproductive Responsibility, Amanda Gvozden

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Fetal Protection Laws (FPLs) are laws that define and provide punishments for any number of crimes, including homicide, committed “against a fetus.” Previous literature has suggested that FPLs need to be explicit about who the intended target of this legislation is. Specifically, comments concerned about the use of FPLs against pregnant women in relation to their own pregnancies suggested that states include language in their FPLs that make it clear that the law ought not be applied to women for harm to their own fetuses. Indeed, some states like California have taken measures to curtail the application of FPLs to …

Reframing Hate, Lu-In Wang

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The concept and naming of “hate crime,” and the adoption of special laws to address it, provoked controversy and raised fundamental questions when they were introduced in the 1980s. In the decades since, neither hate crime itself nor those hotly debated questions have abated. To the contrary, hate crime has increased in recent years—although the prominent target groups have shifted over time—and the debate over hate crime laws has reignited as well. The still-open questions range from the philosophical to the doctrinal to the pragmatic: What justifies the enhanced punishment that hate crime laws impose based on the perpetrator’s motivation? …

A Scoping Review Comparing Sustainable Diet Indices, Natalie Henning

Public Health Theses

Interest in environmentally sustainable diets (i.e., diets beneficial for both human and planetary health) has increased as the role of food systems in climate change and population health has become better understood. Sustainable diet indices have been proposed as a holistic approach to assessing diets around the world with regards to human and planetary outcomes. The aim of this scoping review was to summarize and compare sustainable diet indices and their applicability to various populations.A literature search of three databases (Scopus, PubMed, and the Climate Change and Human Health Literature Search Portal) was conducted to identify articles that developed, validated, …

Identification Of An In Vitro Medium For Leptospira Spp. As A Surrogate For Host Environment, Using Rna-Seq Transcriptome Analysis, Zitong Lin

Public Health Theses

Pathogenic Leptospira species causes millions of leptospirosis cases around the world and is an urgent public health issue that needs to be properly addressed. The infection leads to clinical manifestations ranging from self-limiting febrile illness to severe life-threatening symptoms. Currently, there is a lack of sensitive assay for early diagnosis of leptospirosis, and there is no FDA-approved vaccine for human use in the United States. Despite the worldwide occurrence of this zoonotic disease, low and middle-income countries are disproportionately affected by it. A better understanding of the pathogenesis of Leptospira is a crucial step for the development of better diagnostic …

Melissa: Monitoring The Environment With Living Investigatory Sentinel Species Apis Mellifera, Brady Rowe

Public Health Theses

Without the ability to meaningfully detect an environmental contaminant, public health efforts can get behind the curve, and people suffer for it. Industrial polluters are the major source of environmental contamination. Despite regulation, industrial compliance efforts are often limited by the difficulty of getting samples to analyze due to cost and logistical challenges. The current method requires a compliance officer to gather a sample or rely on self-reported measures from the potential polluters. This process can be remarkably costly both in capital and human labor. These issues can be remedied by relying on the domesticated honeybee to gather the “samples.” …

Demographic Representation In Clinical Trials Of Pharmacotherapy Fertility Treatments In Women With Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (Pcos): A Cross-Sectional Analysis, Kendall Watanabe

Public Health Theses

ABSTRACT: Background: While Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is a medical condition that impacts women of childbearing age, prior research has shown that women of color are at a disproportionately higher risk. The goal of this meta research project is to closely model a systematic process to assess demographic characteristics of participants recruited and enrolled in clinical trials and RCTs in PCOS-related research studies. Methods: An exhaustive electronic database search was performed through Ovid MEDLINE, PubMed, Scopus, Ovid Embase, and Web of Science to identify studies that focused on PCOS-related infertility. Out of the 2,883 records identified in the initial search …

C-Myc Targeting By Degradation: Novel Dual C-Myc/Gspt1 Degrader Gt19715 Exerts Profound Cell Kill In Vitro And In Vivo In Acute Myeloid Leukemia And Lymphomas, Yuki Nishida Md, Phd, Darah A. Scruggs, Edward Ayoub Phd, Tallie Patsilevas, Lauren Ostermann, Vivian R. Ruvolo, Po Yee Mak, Bing Z. Carter, Steffen Boettcher, Abhishek Maiti, Qianxiang Zhou, Zhaohui Yang, Honghua Yan, Liandong Ma, Michael Andreeff Md, Phd

Leading Edge of Cancer Research Symposium 2022

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The New Slot Machine: An International Perspective On Why The United States Should Learn To Stop Loving The Loot Box, Ajay Harish

Emory International Law Review

Games of chance are woven into the fabric of human culture. Rapid shifts in technology have resulted in the creation of the loot box, a new video game monetization scheme formed from the dregs of slot machines and trading cards. While extremely lucrative, the existence of loot boxes allows game companies to expose children to wager-like behavior, potentially creating a new generation of problem gamblers. The United States is both financially and culturally tied to video games as an industry and has been slow in its regulation of loot boxes. Given the problematic nature of loot boxes, existing regulations in …

Natural Law And Universal Human Rights, David F. Forte

Emory International Law Review

Abdullahi An-Na‘im has set his life’s quest on attempting to find a way that Muslim society can be attuned to the moral commands of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a Western creation. At present, the Shari‘a and the Declaration are in obvious tension, if not conflict, in areas such as freedom of religion and the rights of women. An-Na‘im finds that the Shari‘a is a creation of man derived in history from an interpretation of Islamic sources. Muslims today can legitimately develop their own interpretation relying on the root sources of Islam, but only so long as those sources …

Muslim Modernism, Islamic Law, And The Universality Of Human Rights, Mohammad Fadel

Emory International Law Review

I first encountered Professor An-Na’im’s work quite serendipitously as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. At that time, I had not yet begun my legal studies and was early in my graduate student days at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. While browsing the stacks of the Regenstein Library, my eyes fell upon Professor An-Na’im’s book, Toward an Islamic Reformation. Although the book was not particularly relevant to my coursework at the time, its title intrigued me and I checked it out and read it quickly alongside my other assignments. At that time, I thought …

Targeting Medium-Chain Acyl-Coa Dehydrogenase For Glioblastoma, Fei Yu, Paul Leonard, Matthew Hamilton, Francesca Puca, Nhung Pham, Norma Rogers, Fernando Alvarez, C Rodriguez, Vinay Nair, Narahari Akkaladevi, Roopa Thapar, Scott Vaccaro, Andrea Mendiola, Quanyun Xu, Mary Geck Do, Jason Cross, Mick Soth, Yongying Jiang, Giulio Draetta, Philip Jones

Leading Edge of Cancer Research Symposium 2022

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Inactivation Of Aurora Kinases And Cyclin-Dependent Kinases 4/6 Allows Cancers To Adopt An Endoreplication And Form Polyploid/Polyaneuploid Giant Cancer Cells (Pgccs/Paccs) That Resist Antimitotic Drugs, Vural Tagal, Uttam K. Tambar, Noemi Andor, Michael G. Roth, John D. Minna

Leading Edge of Cancer Research Symposium 2022

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The Fountain Formula. Damien Hirst’S Use Of Marcel Duchamp’S Readymade Controversy, Grayson Nader

Theses

Controversial art challenges the norms of society, by pushing boundaries to expose what is comfortable and uncomfortable. It inevitably garners attention and demands discourse. Marcel Duchamp was an innovator of controversy. He was angered by the status quo and material greed of the art industry of the early 1900s and rebelled against it with his now-famous readymade, Fountain. In Fountain, Duchamp created a formula that used controversy to garner attention from the public, the media and the art world. This formula was used by various artists throughout the past century. Contemporary artist Damien Hirst was disillusioned by the monotony of …

The Effects Of Preference Assessments On The Duration Of Independent Play For A Child With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Elise Amo, Robbie Hanson

Theses

Plays skills are important within typical development and independent play has shown to lead to the development of other skills, such as increased social interactions (Edwards et al., 2018). Previous research has demonstrated increases in independent play for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who display skill deficits in this area. However, research has been largely lacking for increasing independent play for individuals with ASD who simply display a preference for interacting with adults. The current study examined the effectiveness of incorporating a multiple-stimulus without replacement (MSWO) preference assessment to increase the duration of independent play for a child with …

Letter 1 (D)

Letters from New South Wales to King George’s Sound, 1826 to 1831

To the commandant of King George's Sound Letter 1 continued

Disparities In Demand For Covid-19 Hospital Care In The United States: Insights From A Longitudinal Hierarchical Study, Wolfgang Messner

Faculty Publications

Background and aims

This study examined disparities in hospitalization for COVID-19 within the U.S. by racial and ethnic groups, health insurance status, and social support structure.

Methods

Using publicly available ecological case and contextual data from July 2020 to April 2021, a longitudinal hierarchical model for the 51 U.S. states was constructed.

Results

Racial/ethnic disparities were observed, such as that hospitalization rates were higher in states with a higher percentage of Black (β = .002, P = .009) and American Indian or Alaska Native persons (β = .003, P = .03). Conversely, lack of health insurance was related …

Concurrent Measurements Of Inflow, Power Performance And Loads For A Grid-Synchronized Cross-Flow Turbine Operating In A Tidal Estuary, Patrick W. O'Byrne

Master's Theses and Capstones

The adaptation of sustainable fluid energy conversion technologies, such as wind or tidalenergy, requires numerical modeling tools that are able to accurately predict device performance and loading in an effort to reduce the costs of turbines, deployment platforms and mooring structures. To validate models, data sets from turbines operating in real flow environments are required. Particularly for tidal energy, data sets of inflow (tidal current resource), power performance (electrical power and shaft speed), and thrust loading for any scale device are rare because the work to date has largely been funded by private developers and the data is not made …

Benchmarking Ultra-High Molecular Weight Dna Preservation Methods For Long-Read And Long-Range Sequencing, Hollis A. Dahn, Jacquelyn Mountcastle, Jennifer Balacco, Sylke Winkler, Iliana Bista, Anthony D. Schmitt, Olga Vinnere Pettersson, Giulio Formenti, Karen Oliver, Michelle Smith, Wenhua Tan, Anne Kraus, Stephen Mac, Lisa M. Komoroske, Tanya Lama, Andrew J. Crawford, Robert W. Murphy, Samara Brown, Alan F. Scott, Phillip A. Morin, Erich D. Jarvis, Olivier Fedrigo

Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

Background: Studies in vertebrate genomics require sampling from a broad range of tissue types, taxa, and localities. Recent advancements in long-read and long-range genome sequencing have made it possible to produce high-quality chromosome-level genome assemblies for almost any organism. However, adequate tissue preservation for the requisite ultra-high molecular weight DNA (uHMW DNA) remains a major challenge. Here we present a comparative study of preservation methods for field and laboratory tissue sampling, across vertebrate classes and different tissue types. Results: We find that storage temperature was the strongest predictor of uHMW fragment lengths. While immediate flash-freezing remains the sample preservation gold …

Are Times A-Changin’? Exploring Current Perceptions Of Individuals Based On Sexual And Relationship Orientations, Leah Howard, Kenneth Barideaux

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

The purpose of this study was to explore if there were any significant differences in perceptions of couples based on their sexual orientation (heterosexual or homosexual) and their relationship orientation (monogamous or consensually nonmonogamous).

As perceptions held by individuals influence collective perceptions when they are largely held in common, there is value in capturing culturally current perceptions of individuals to assess if social shifts may be on the horizon. To measure the perceptions of individuals with regards to sexual and relationship orientation, a sample of 37 college students were instructed to read narrative paragraphs about four couples.

Participants were then …

Hydroxychloroquine Induces Endothelium-Dependent And Endothelium-Independent Relaxation Of Rat Aorta, Seyfullah Oktay Arslan, Muhammed Fati̇h Doğan, Sali̇ha Ayşenur Çam, Ibraheem Akram Omar, Fatma Uysal, Ali̇ Parlar, Ahmet Cenk Andaç, Oğuzhan Yildiz

Turkish Journal of Medical Sciences

No abstract provided.