Digital Commons Network^™

Multiplexed Transgenic Selection And Counterselection Strategies To Expedite Genetic Manipulation Workflows Using Drosophila Melanogaster, Koen J T Venken, Nick Matinyan, Yezabel Gonzalez, Herman A Dierick

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

We recently described a set of four selectable and two counterselectable markers that provide resistance and sensitivity, respectively, against their corresponding drugs using the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. The four selectable markers provide animal resistance against G418 sulfate, Puromycin HCl, Blasticidin S, or Hygromycin B, while the two counterselection markers make animals sensitive to Ganciclovir/Acyclovir, or 5-Fluorocytosine. Unlike classical phenotypic markers, visual or fluorescent, which require extensive screening progeny of a genetic cross for desired genotypes, resistance and sensitivity markers eliminate this laborious procedure by directly selecting for, or counterselecting against, the desired genotypes. We demonstrated the usefulness of …

A Next-Generation Approach To Mental Health Outcomes: Treatment, Time, And Trajectories, Mario Montelongo, Jaehoon Lee, Edward Poa, Robert Boland, Katrina A Rufino, Michelle Patriquin, Hyuntaek Oh

Staff and Researcher Publications

Over the last several decades, inpatient psychiatric length of stay (LOS) has been greatly reduced to the detriment of patients. Latent variable mixture modeling, can be used to improve the quality of care for patients by identifying unobserved subgroups and optimize treatment variables, including LOS. This study had three objectives (1) to replicate the findings made by Oh et al. in a distinct sample, (2) to examine demographic differences related to inpatient treatment trajectories, and (3) to relate additional variables to each trajectory. We collected data on six key mental illness factors and information on felonies, misdemeanors, history of stopping …

Pediatric Rhabdomyosarcoma Incidence And Survival In The United States: An Assessment Of 5656 Cases, 2001–2017, Matthew T Mcevoy, David A Siegel, Shifan Dai, Mehmet Fatih Okcu, Mark Zobeck, Rajkumar Venkatramani, Philip J Lupo

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

BACKGROUND: While rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is the most common soft tissue sarcoma in children and adolescents, past epidemiology studies of this malignancy used data that covered

METHODS: Incidence and survival were assessed for pediatric patients diagnosed with RMS during 2003-2017 and 2001-2016, respectively. Both demographic and clinical variables were evaluated. Age-adjusted incidence rates, average annual percent change (AAPC), and 5-year relative survival (RS) were calculated, all with corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Cox regression models were used to evaluate the impact of demographic and clinical variables on survival.

RESULTS: We identified 5656 primary RMS cases in USCS during 2003-2017. The age-adjusted …

Molecular Mechanisms Regulating Wound Repair: Evidence For Paracrine Signaling From Corneal Epithelial Cells To Fibroblasts And Immune Cells Following Transient Epithelial Cell Treatment With Mitomycin C, Sonali Pal-Ghosh, Beverly A Karpinski, Himani Datta Majumdar, Trisha Ghosh, Julie Thomasian, Stephen R Brooks, Andrew P Sawaya, Maria I Morasso, Kaitlin K Scholand, Cintia S De Paiva, Jeremias G Galletti, Mary Ann Stepp

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

In this paper, we use RNAseq to identify senescence and phagocytosis as key factors to understanding how mitomyin C (MMC) stimulates regenerative wound repair. We use conditioned media (CM) from untreated (CMC) and MMC treated (CMM) human and mouse corneal epithelial cells to show that corneal epithelial cells indirectly exposed to MMC secrete elevated levels of immunomodulatory proteins including IL-1α and TGFβ1 compared to cells exposed to CMC. These factors increase epithelial and macrophage phagocytosis and promote ECM turnover. IL-1α supplementation can increase phagocytosis in control epithelial cells and attenuate TGFβ1 induced αSMA expression by corneal fibroblasts. Yet, we show …

Factors Affecting Adherence To Intranasal Treatment For Allergic Rhinitis: A Qualitative Study, Meha G Fox, Lauren M Cass, Kevin J Sykes, Emily L Cummings, Scott N Fassas, Rohit Nallani, Josh B Smith, Alexander G Chiu, Jennifer A Villwock

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

OBJECTIVE: To determine the facilitators of and barriers to adherence to use of intranasal pharmacotherapy (daily intranasal corticosteroids and/or antihistamine, and nasal saline irrigation [NSI]), for allergic rhinitis (AR).

METHODS: Patients were recruited from an academic tertiary care rhinology and allergy clinic. Semi-structured interviews were conducted after the initial visit and/or 4-6 weeks following treatment. Transcribed interviews were analyzed using a grounded theory, inductive approach to elucidate themes regarding patient adherence to AR treatment.

RESULTS: A total of 32 patients (12 male, 20 female; age 22-78) participated (seven at initial visit, seven at follow-up visit, and 18 at both). Memory …

Human-Centered Ai For Software Engineering: Requirements, Reflection, And Road Ahead, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Since its inception in the 2000s, AI for Software Engineering (AI4SE) has grown rapidly. AI in its different forms, e.g., data mining, information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, etc., has been demonstrated to be able to produce good results for automating many tasks, including specification mining, bug and vulnerability discovery, bug localization, duplicate bug report identification, failure detection, program repair, technical question answering, code search, and many more. AI4SE has much potential to improve software engineers’ productivity and software quality. Due to its potential, it is currently one of the most popular research areas in the software engineering field.To …

Future Aware Pricing And Matching For Sustainable On-Demand Ride Pooling, Xianjie Zhang, Pradeep Varakantham, Hao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The popularity of on-demand ride pooling is owing to the benefits offered to customers (lower prices), taxi drivers (higher revenue), environment (lower carbon footprint due to fewer vehicles) and aggregation companies like Uber (higher revenue). To achieve these benefits, two key interlinked challenges have to be solved effectively: (a) pricing – setting prices to customer requests for taxis; and (b) matching – assignment of customers (that accepted the prices) to taxis/cars. Traditionally, both these challenges have been studied individually and using myopic approaches (considering only current requests), without considering the impact of current matching on addressing future requests. In this …

Confucius, Wisdom, And Political Participation: Benevolence And Timeliness In The Analects, Sydney Morrow, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper aims to address when the wise person should participate in politics. The question is addressed through engagement with the Analects. Rather than provide interpretations of key terms in the Analects, we provide an account of wisdom that draws from themes in the Analects. The case is made that the wise person is committed to participating in politics primarily because of the connection between wisdom and benevolence (ren 仁 in the Analects). We address challenges to the Confucian approach from the Zhuangzi concerning the potential harms of political participation. General political disengagement is not considered exemplary on the Confucian …

Disentangling The Effects Of Smartphone Screen Time, Checking Frequency, And Problematic Use On Executive Function: A Structural Equation Modelling Analysis, Wei Xing Toh, Wee Qin Ng, Hwajin Yang, Sujin Yang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The pervasiveness of smartphone engagement among young adults has attracted growing interest regarding its impact on cognitive processes. However, research on the relation between smartphone use and executive function (EF)—a set of adaptive, goal-directed control processes—remains inconclusive due to imprecise estimation of EF dimensions and inconsistent operationalisation of smartphone use in past studies. Therefore, we examined how two indices of smartphone use—screen time and checking frequency—would predict EF (common EF, shifting-specific-, and working-memory-specific components), using a latent-variable approach based on a comprehensive battery of EF tasks. We also examined the moderating role of problematic smartphone use in the link between …

Effects Of Positive Reappraisal And Self-Distancing On The Meaningfulness Of Everyday Negative Events, Clement Yong Hao Lau, William Tov

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Current work on meaning-making has primarily focused on major negative life events such as trauma and loss, leaving common daily adversities unexplored. This study aimed to examine how utilizing meaning-making strategies such as positive reappraisal and self-distancing (in isolation or in combination) can facilitate an adaptive processing of these daily negative experiences. Overall meaning and facets of meaning (coherence, purpose, and significance/mattering) were assessed at both global and situational levels. Results suggested that positive reappraisal was generally effective for enhancing situational meaning but not under all conditions. Specifically, when negative experiences were high on emotional intensity, reflecting on the experience …

A Narrative Review Of Screen Time And Wellbeing Among Adolescents Before And During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Implications For The Future, Verity Yu Qing Lua, Terence B. K. Chua, Michael Y. H. Chia

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of many. In particular, during the height of the pandemic, many experienced lockdowns, which in turn increased screen time drastically. While the pandemic has been declared an endemic and most activities have been reinstated, there appears to still be elevated screen time among adolescents due to poor habits formed during the pandemic lockdowns. This paper explores the factors by which screen time affects well-being among adolescents and how the pandemic may have influenced some of these factors. For example, beyond having greater screen time, many adolescents have also reduced their physical activities and …

Online Hyperparameter Optimization For Class-Incremental Learning, Yaoyao Liu, Yingying Li, Bernt Schiele, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to train a classification model while the number of classes increases phase-by-phase. An inherent challenge of CIL is the stability-plasticity tradeoff, i.e., CIL models should keep stable to retain old knowledge and keep plastic to absorb new knowledge. However, none of the existing CIL models can achieve the optimal tradeoff in different data-receiving settings—where typically the training-from-half (TFH) setting needs more stability, but the training-from-scratch (TFS) needs more plasticity. To this end, we design an online learning method that can adaptively optimize the tradeoff without knowing the setting as a priori. Specifically, we first introduce the …

Real-Time Hierarchical Map Segmentation For Coordinating Multi-Robot Exploration, Tianze Luo, Zichen Chen, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Coordinating a team of autonomous agents to explore an environment can be done by partitioning the map of the environment into segments and allocating the segments as targets for the individual agents to visit. However, given an unknown environment, map segmentation must be conducted in a continuous and incremental manner. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time hierarchical map segmentation method for supporting multi-agent exploration of indoor environments, wherein clusters of regions of segments are formed hierarchically from randomly sampled points in the environment. Each cluster is then assigned with a cost-utility value based on the minimum cost possible …

The City Never Sleeps: But When Will Investment Banks Wake Up To The Climate Crisis?, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Andrea G. F. Hoepner, Fabiola I. Schneider, Michael Urban, Anh Vu, Dariusz Wojcik

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Using a global dataset of over 840,000 equity, bond and syndicated loan investment banking deals, we build the fossil fuel investment brokerage profile of financial centres worldwide between 2000 and 2018. We also study whether city-level fossil fuel divestment commitments and country-level green banking policies impact the profile of fossil fuel financial centres over our study timeframe. We find that several financial centres shift their fossil fuel investment brokerage profiles substantially, including the asset classes in which they are active. However, we do not find any evidence that this is driven by city-level divestment commitments. In contrast, we find that …

What Are The Relationships Between Public Transit And Gentrification Progress? An Empirical Study In The New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island Areas, Yefu Chen, Hao Xi, Junfeng Jiao

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Transit-oriented development has been a widely accepted tool among transportation planning practitioners; however, there are concerns about the risk of increasing residential property values leading to gentrification or displacements. Therefore, it is critical to provide precise investigations of the relationships between public transit and gentrification. Although numerous studies have explored this topic, few have discussed these relationships based on detailed measurements of gentrification from a regional perspective. This study aims to fill the research gap by measuring the gentrification subcategories through a hierarchical definition based on data in the New York–Northern New Jersey–Long Island areas and applying the transit desert …

Identification Of A Rare Sars-Cov-2 Xl Hybrid Variant In Wastewater And The Subsequent Discovery Of Two Infected Individuals In Nevada, Van Vo, Anthony Harrington, Salman Afzal, Katerina Papp, Ching-Lan Chang, Hayley Baker, Perseveranda Aguilar, Erin Buttery, Michael A. Picker, Cassius Lockett, Daniel Gerrity, Horng-Yuan Kan, Edwin C. Oh

Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine Faculty Research

The identification of novel SARS-CoV-2 variants can predict new patterns of COVID-19 community transmission and lead to the deployment of public health resources. However, increased access to at-home antigen tests and reduced free PCR tests have recently led to data gaps for the surveillance of evolving SARS-CoV-2 variants. To overcome such limitations, we asked whether wastewater surveillance could be leveraged to detect rare variants circulating in a community before local detection in human cases. Here, we performed whole genome sequencing (WGS) of SARS-CoV-2 from a wastewater treatment plant serving Las Vegas, Nevada in April 2022. Using metrics that exceeded 100× …

Political Economy In Lettres D'Une Péruvienne: Françoise De Graffigny As Philosophe And Reformer, Marguerite J. Van Cook

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation identifies the significant presence of political economics in Lettres d’une Péruvienne by Françoise de Graffigny, née Françoise d'Issembourg du Buisson d'Happencourt (1695 –1758), to affirm its author as a pioneer in the field. It explores Graffigny’s use of the sentimental novel as a vehicle to carry those ideas to the reading community. It reviews Graffigny’s preparation to propose novel ideas in the area of political economics and to fully participate in the then-emergent discourse with her male contemporaries. Her wide reading in the subject of Political Economy, from Voltaire to Mandeville and Montesquieu and her interactions with contemporaries …

The Effect Of Race On Housing Stratification Among Latinos, Julia T. Gomez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Housing discrimination has been an ethical, social, and economic blight on the American society. Among the negative outcomes of this practice are higher crime rates, lower educational attainment, and concentrated poverty. Beyond the moral injustice of this practice, housing discrimination adversely affects the socio-economic mobility of those victimized and this extends across generations. The research on the intersection of race and Latino identity demonstrates the complexity of the issue and suggests that an examination such as done in this study can add to the current knowledge. The purpose of this study was to determine what, if any, association race has …

Analysis Of Electrophysiological Markers And Correlated Components Of Neural Responses To Discourse Coherence, Kurt M. Masiello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Constructing meaning from spoken language is invaluable for learning, social interaction, and communication. In clinical populations with developmental disorders of speech comprehension, the severity of disruption can persist and vary from limiting occupational opportunities to lower performance outcomes. Previous research has reported an event-related potential (ERP) neural positivity over right hemisphere lateral anterior sites in response to semantic and discourse processing. Although useful as a marker for clinical populations of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and developmental language disorder (DLD), little is understood about the dynamics and neural sources of this biological marker. In addition to traditional methods of ERP analysis, …

Pronunciation Ambiguities In Japanese Kanji, Wen Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Japanese writing is a complex system, and a large part of the complexity resides in the use of kanji. A single kanji character in modern Japanese may have multiple pronunciations, either as native vocabulary or as words borrowed from Chinese. This causes a problem for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) because the system has to predict which pronunciation of each kanji character is appropriate in the context. The problem is called homograph disambiguation. In Japanese TTS technology, the trick in any case is to know which is the right reading, which makes reading Japanese text a challenge. To solve the problem, …

A Quantum Approach To Language Modeling, Constantijn Van Der Poel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of six chapters. . . Chapter 1: We introduce language modeling, outline the software used for this thesis, and discuss related work. Chapter 2: We will unpack the transition from classical to quantum probabilities, as well as motivate their use in building a model to understand language-like datasets. Chapter 3: We motivate the Motzkin dataset, the models we will be investigating, as well as the necessary algorithms to do calculations with them. Chapter 4: We investigate our models’ sensitivity to various hyperparameters. Chapter 5: We compare the performance and robustness of the models. Chapter 6: We conclude …

Cost-Effective And Performance-Preserving Secured Application Management In Cloud Environments, Minh Nguyen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Data-intensive science applications in areas such as high-energy and particle physics, bioinformatics, genomics, and healthcare are increasingly using distributed resources for computation and storage. For distributed systems, such applications can be represented in terms of: i) the involved data (e.g., sensitive healthcare data requiring HIPAA-compliance) and ii) the different lifecycle stages of processing, transfer, and storage that the data goes through (i.e., the application workflow which is typically represented as a directed acyclic graph). In most cases, such applications have specific performance (i.e., in terms of compute/networking/storage resources) and security requirements for both the data and workflow stages. Hence, more …

Bearer Negotiable Instruments: Addressing A Financial Intelligence Gap And Identifying Criminogenic Weaknesses, Hollis B. Kegg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bearer Negotiable Instruments (BNI) are a long-standing category of financial instruments used to transfer large amounts of money in ways that may not be subject to regulation, reporting, tracking, review, or oversight. There is limited information available on BNIs, and no evidence that any studies have been undertaken on BNIs alone, much less reported. Increasingly, BNIs are being used for illegal purposes including money laundering. This study gathers information about their characteristics, nature, purpose, legal status, and numbers. It also focuses on the crime risks associated with BNIs, the crime opportunities they facilitate, and the criminal weaknesses in the financial …

Writing The Unwritten: Politicians, Celebrities And Activists On Lebanese Twitter, May Ahmar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the language and orthographic practices of different social groups on Lebanese Twitter. It draws on a specific event in Lebanon, namely the Lebanese presidential elections of 2016. The data, a collection of tweets from three different social groups (politicians, celebrities, and activists) during the month leading up to the announcement of the Lebanese president, delve into the choices of languages, orthographies and spelling that these groups exhibit on Twitter. My analysis shows that politicians use MSA mostly in alignment with their identity, linguistic hegemony and traditional media practices. Celebrities show more flexibility by choosing different languages and …

Incarceration-Related Stigma And Caring Self-Efficacy Among Long-Term Care Nurses, Sandra D. Langston

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: A silver tsunami is occurring in U.S. prisons because of an unprecedented increase in the older population. Prisons are structurally ill-suited to care for this population and financially burdened with providing the necessary medical and nursing care. States have enacted legislation to afford justice-involved persons parole to manage chronic conditions in community-based long-term care (LTC) facilities. Changes in Medicaid regulations provide a seamless transition from prison to community long-term care for this population. However, it is not known if the stigma of justice involvement impacts the perception of long-term nurses concerning this population.

Aims/Purpose: This study examined the effects …

A Novel Measure Of Narrative Self-Functioning And Its Role In The Transformative Potential Of Psychedelic Experience Across Clinical And Non-Clinical Participants, Nicole M. Amada

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The eudaimonic field of well-being is founded on the idea that self-knowledge and the realization of one’s potential is at the heart of what it means to strive for well-being. While the “self” is at the core of this perspective, theories derived from this field have yet to incorporate neurocognitive conceptualizations of the self, and account for the collection of self-referential cognitions that influence striving for well-being. Such a theory and measure could fill this theoretical gap and be applied in person centered interventions to capture change in these processes over time. One such intervention utilizes psychedelic experience as a …

Low-Cost Quadrature Optical Interferometer, Tanner M. Melody, Krishna H. Patel, Peter K. Nguyen, Christopher L. Smallwood

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

We report on the construction and characterization of a low-cost Mach-Zehnder optical interferometer in which quadrature signal detection is achieved by means of polarization control. The device incorporates a generic green laser pointer, home-built photodetectors, 3D-printed optical mounts, a circular polarizer extracted from a pair of 3D movie glasses, and a python-enabled microcontroller for analog-to-digital data acquisition. Components fit inside of a 12 ″ × 6 ″ space and can be assembled on a budget of less than US$500. The device has the potential to make quadrature interferometry accessible and affordable for instructors, students, and enthusiasts alike.

Retrospective Analysis Of Measures To Reduce Large Whale Entanglements In A Lucrative Commercial Fishery, Leena Riekkola, Owen R. Liu, Blake E. Feist, Karin A. Forney, Briana Abrahms, Elliott L. Hazen, Jameal F. Samhouri

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Recovering marine animal populations and climate-driven shifts in their distributions are colliding with growing ocean use by humans. One such example is the bycatch of whales in commercial fishing, which poses a significant threat to the conservation and continued recovery of these protected animals and is a major barrier to sustainable fisheries. Long-lasting solutions to this problem need to be robust to variability in ecological dynamics while also addressing socio-cultural and economic concerns. We assessed the efficacy of gear reductions as an entanglement mitigation strategy during 2019 and 2020 in the highly valuable Dungeness crab fishery (Washington State, USA) in …

Do We Need Patient-Specific Qa For Adaptively Generated Plans? Retrospective Evaluation Of Delivered Online Adaptive Treatment Plans On Varian Ethos, Xiaodong Zhao, Dennis N Stanley, Carlos E Cardenas, Joseph Harms, Richard A Popple

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUND: The clinical introduction of dedicated treatment units for online adaptive radiation therapy (OART) has led to widespread adoption of daily adaptive radiotherapy. OART allows for rapid generation of treatment plans using daily patient anatomy, potentially leading to reduction of treatment margins and increased normal tissue sparing. However, the OART workflow does not allow for measurement of patient-specific quality assurance (PSQA) during treatment delivery sessions and instead relies on secondary dose calculations for verification of adapted plans. It remains unknown if independent dose verification is a sufficient surrogate for PSQA measurements.

PURPOSE: To evaluate the plan quality of previously treated …

Summit Snapshot: Rural Digital Access, University Of Montana Rural Institute

Independent Living and Community Participation

RTC:Rural researchers and panels of individuals with lived experience present research and perspectives on rural digital access at the 2023 Rural Disability Research and Practice Summit.