Digital Commons Network^™

Clinical Use Of Mean Nocturnal Baseline Impedance And Post-Reflux Swallow-Induced Peristaltic Wave Index For The Diagnosis Of Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease, Pierfrancesco Visaggi, Lucia Mariani, Federica Baiano Svizzero, Luca Tarducci, Andrea Sostilio, Marzio Frazzoni, Salvatore Tolone, Roberto Penagini, Leonardo Frazzoni, Linda Ceccarelli, Vincenzo Savarino, Massimo Bellini, Prakash C Gyawali, Edoardo V Savarino, Nicola De Bortoli

2020-Current year OA Pubs

The clinical diagnosis of gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD) is based on the presence of typical esophageal troublesome symptoms. In clinical practice, heartburn relief following a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) trial or endoscopy can confirm a diagnosis of GERD. In cases of diagnostic uncertainty or before anti-reflux interventions, combined impedance-pH monitoring (MII-pH) provides a comprehensive assessment of both physical and chemical properties of the refluxate, allowing to achieve a conclusive diagnosis of GERD. Recently, the Lyon Consensus proposed the use of mean nocturnal baseline impedance (MNBI) and post-reflux swallow-induced peristaltic wave index (PSPW-I) as novel MII-pH metrics to support the diagnosis …

Event Scale Analysis Of Streamflow Response To Wildfire In Oregon, 2020, Will B. Long, Heejun Chang

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Wildfire increases the magnitude of runoff in catchments, leading to the degradation of ecosystems, risk to infrastructure, and loss of life. The Labor Day Fires of 2020 provided an opportunity to compare multiple large and severe wildfires with the objective of determining potential changes to hydrologic processes in Oregon Cascades watersheds. Geographic information systems (GIS) were implemented to determine the total percentage burned and percentage of high burn severity class of six watersheds on the west slope of the Oregon Cascade Range. In addition, two control watersheds were included to contrast the influence of climatic effects. Spatial arrangements of burned …

Reliable Mode Tracking For Gradient-Based Optimization With Dynamic Stability Constraints, Taylor Mcdonnell, Andrew Ning

Faculty Publications

In order to construct mode-specific flutter constraints for use in gradient-based multidisciplinary design optimization frameworks, mode tracking must be used to associate the current iteration's modes with the modes corresponding to each constraint function. Existing mode tracking methods, however, do not provide a method by which to ensure the accuracy of mode associations, making them unsuitable for use in situations where obtaining correct mode associations is critical. To remedy this issue, a new mode tracking method is presented which incorporates backtracking logic in order to maintain an arbitrarily high degree of confidence in mode correlations during gradient-based optimization and/or during …

Tdcs Induced Gaba Change Is Associated With The Simulated Electric Field In M1, An Effect Mediated By Grey Matter Volume In The Mrs Voxel, Tulika Nandi, Oula Puonti, William T. Clarke, Caroline Nettekoven, Helen C. Barron, James Kolasinski, Taylor Hanayik, Emily L. Hinson, Adam Berrington, Anderson M. Winkler

School of Medicine Publications

Background and objective

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has wide ranging applications in neuro-behavioural and physiological research, and in neurological rehabilitation. However, it is currently limited by substantial inter-subject variability in responses, which may be explained, at least in part, by anatomical differences that lead to variability in the electric field (E-field) induced in the cortex. Here, we tested whether the variability in the E-field in the stimulated cortex during anodal tDCS, estimated using computational simulations, explains the variability in tDCS induced changes in GABA, a neurophysiological marker of stimulation effect.

Methods

Data from five previously conducted MRS …

A Path To Success: A Case Study Of Military Veterans At A Midwestern University, Jada N. Reynolds

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract The purpose of this study was to examine the lived experiences of military veterans transitioning from service members to civilian life. The study was conducted using semistructured interviews with eight transitioning veterans who had completed their bachelor’s degree from the same Midwestern U. S. university between 2017 and 2022. Retention theory, and transition theory were used as the guiding theories for this study. An intrinsic qualitative case study was used for data analysis, which resulted in the emerging themes (a) Transitioning from Military Service to Civilian Life, (b) Work-Life-Study Balance: Confronting Challenges, and (c) Supporting Military Veterans. This study …

Healing The Burn: Assuaging Burnout And Increasing Work Engagement In University Admissions Counselors, Michael K. Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Tuition-driven universities depend heavily on net tuition revenue to operate. However, the individuals responsible for delivering the type of enrollment that meets university goals, known as the university admissions counselors, tend to be underpaid, burnt out, and likely to depart their institutions before meaningful recruiting relationships can be formed. The implications of this issue lead to high costs of turnover and training of new staff, a recruiting territory in flux due to the turnstile nature of the profession and an office culture that lacks any genuine consistency. Many studies in the past have focused on the specific reasons that frontline …

Removing Barriers That Prevent Parents From Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds From Being Involved In Their Children’S High School Education, Jason E. Shepherd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract The purpose of this qualitative case study was to describe the barriers that prevent parents from low socioeconomic backgrounds from being involved in their children’s high school education at District X in rural East Texas. Fifteen high school teacher participants were interviewed and provided their experiences and perceptions to support the interviews and focus groups. The primary findings identified teachers’ perceptions of the barriers that prevent parental involvement, parents’ commitment to their children’s high school education, and the teacher’s role in removing barriers that prevent parents from low socioeconomic backgrounds from being involved in their children’s high school education. …

The Corner Poset With An Application To An N-Dimensional Hypercube Stacking Puzzle, Ethan Berkove, Jordan Schettler

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

For any dimension n ≥ 3, we establish the corner poset, a natural triangular poset structure on the corners of 2-color hypercubes. We use this poset to study a problem motivated by a classical cube stacking puzzle posed by Percy MacMahon as well as Eric Cross’s more recent “Eight Blocks to Madness.” We say that a hypercube is 2-color when each of its facets has one of two colors. Given an arbitrary multiset of 2-color unit n-dimensional hypercubes, we investigate when it is possible to find a submultiset of 2n hypercubes that can be arranged into a larger hypercube of …

Fulcrum, Newsletter Of The Furman University Libraries. Issue 17, Kathie Sloan, Kathy Hamlin

Libraries Institutional Records

Table of Contents

• From the Director
• Tribute to Jenny Colvin
• Welcome New Librarians: Brittany Champion and Alyssa Nance
• Americans and the Holocaust Traveling Exhibition
• Portrait to Honor Sarah Reese '71
• Patricia Sasser Receives Carol June Bradley Award
• Paige Dhyne Faculty Scholar in Northern Ireland
• Special Collections and Archives: Art History Assignments; New Medieval Manuscripts
• Nancy Sloan Retires after 25+ Years at Furman
• Students Help the Libraries Improve Their Inclusive Descriptive Practices
• Two Library Student Assistants Receive Prestigious Furman Fellows Award
• Interested in Publishing Open Access?
• Pilot Program: Library Digital Accessibility Students
• Senior Spotlight: Furman Libraries' Newest Student Worker Alumni
• 2022 …

Adding Context To Source Code Representations For Deep Learning, Fuwei Tian, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning models have been successfully applied to a variety of software engineering tasks, such as code classification, summarisation, and bug and vulnerability detection. In order to apply deep learning to these tasks, source code needs to be represented in a format that is suitable for input into the deep learning model. Most approaches to representing source code, such as tokens, abstract syntax trees (ASTs), data flow graphs (DFGs), and control flow graphs (CFGs) only focus on the code itself and do not take into account additional context that could be useful for deep learning models. In this paper, we …

Pixel-Wise Energy-Biased Abstention Learning For Anomaly Segmentation On Complex Urban Driving Scenes, Yu Tian, Yuyuan Liu, Guansong Pang, Fengbei Liu, Yuanhong Chen, Gustavo Carneiro

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

State-of-the-art (SOTA) anomaly segmentation approaches on complex urban driving scenes explore pixel-wise classification uncertainty learned from outlier exposure, or external reconstruction models. However, previous uncertainty approaches that directly associate high uncertainty to anomaly may sometimes lead to incorrect anomaly predictions, and external reconstruction models tend to be too inefficient for real-time self-driving embedded systems. In this paper, we propose a new anomaly segmentation method, named pixel-wise energy-biased abstention learning (PEBAL), that explores pixel-wise abstention learning (AL) with a model that learns an adaptive pixel-level anomaly class, and an energy-based model (EBM) that learns inlier pixel distribution. More specifically, PEBAL is …

Physical Adversarial Attack On A Robotic Arm, Yifan Jia, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun, Sudipta Chattopadhyay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaborative Robots (cobots) are regarded as highly safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPSs) owing to their close physical interactions with humans. In settings such as smart factories, they are frequently augmented with AI. For example, in order to move materials, cobots utilize object detectors based on deep learning models. Deep learning, however, has been demonstrated as vulnerable to adversarial attacks: a minor change (noise) to benign input can fool the underlying neural networks and lead to a different result. While existing works have explored such attacks in the context of picture/object classification, less attention has been given to attacking neural networks used …

Shell Theory: A Statistical Model Of Reality, Wen-Yan Lin, Siying Liu, Changhao Ren, Ngai-Man Cheung, Hongdong Li, Yasuyuki Matsushita

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine learning's grand ambition is the mathematical modeling of reality. The recent years have seen major advances using deep-learned techniques that model reality implicitly; however, corresponding advances in explicit mathematical models have been noticeably lacking. We believe this dichotomy is rooted in the limitations of the current statistical tools, which struggle to make sense of the high dimensional generative processes that natural data seems to originate from. This paper proposes a new, distance based statistical technique which allows us to develop elegant mathematical models of such generative processes. Our model suggests that each semantic concept has an associated distinctive-shell which …

Modeling Of Temperature Dependence Of Λ-Graded Ingan Solar Cells For Both Strained And Relaxed Features, Mirsaeid Sarollahi, Mohammad Zamani-Alavijeh, Manal Abdullah Aldawsari, Rohith Allaparthi, Md Helal Uddin Maruf, Malak Refaei, Reem E. Alhelais, Yuriy I. Mazur, Morgan E. Ware

Electrical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The temperature dependence of Λ-graded InGaN solar cells is studied through simulation using nextnano software. Λ-Graded structures have been designed by increasing and then decreasing the indium composition in epitaxial InGaN layers. Due to polarization doping, layers of p-type and n-type doping arise without the need for impurity doping. Different individual structures are designed by varying the indium alloy profile from GaN to maximum indium concentrations, x_max , ranging from 20% to 90% pseudomorphically strained to a GaN substrate and from 20% to 100% for completely strain-relaxed materials and linearly decreases back to GaN. For In_xGa_{1-x …}

The Freedom Collection 2017–2021: Part 2, Uncl Members’ Subject Usage Preferences And Profiles, David C. Tyler

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: White Papers

With data supplied by a colleague, the author looked into the by-subject downloading activities of the members of the University of Nebraska Consortium of Libraries (UNCL): University of Nebraska at Kearney, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Nebraska Medical Center, and University of Nebraska Omaha.

The Freedom Collection 2017–2021: Part 1, The Composition Of The Freedom Collection And Uncl’S Downloads By Member And Subject, David C. Tyler

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: White Papers

With data provided by a colleague, the author looked at the University of Nebraska Consortium of Libraries (UNCL) downloading activity of Elsevier's Freedom Collection for the 2017-2021 interval. Members include the University of Nebraska at Kearney, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Nebraska Medical Center, and University of Nebraska Omaha.

The author looked at activity by member and by subject at the level of journals' Library of Congress Classifications.

This report was submitted in the fall of 2022 to the UNL Libraries Collections Strategies Committee (CSC) and to the members of the Collections Strategies and Open Scholarship (CSOS) department.

Adult Immigrant English Learners’ Perceptions Of Their Multilingual And Multicultural Identities, Greta Mcelvain

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

Adult immigrant English learners (ELs) must navigate living in a new country while also learning a new language. These immigrants are becoming both multicultural and multilingual. It has been established in prior literature that as immigrants adjust to living in a new culture with a different language, they experience both a language (Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015) and cultural (Gibson, 2001, as cited in Schwartz, 2006, p. 2) shift. These shifts can sometimes result in immigrants losing connection to their first languages (Zhang, 2010) or their home cultures Gu and Lai (2019). Self-reflection activities have been shown to allow individuals to …

What Common Elementary Practices Impact Teacher Efficacy?, Staci Souhan

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

Efficacy and its impact on student outcomes have often been researched. Specific practices within an elementary setting that impact teacher efficacy has not been widely researched. This research focused on gathering the perceptions of elementary teachers regarding which experiences had impacted their feelings of efficacy positively or negatively. This qualitative research followed a grounded theory process. Data collection methods involved gathering data from an email survey and following up with a focus group which allowed triangulation of data and findings. Participants from a midwestern suburban high-performing elementary school were selected for this research based on the assumption that high-performing schools …

English Learner Families, Rural County Public Libraries, And Rural Public Elementary Schools, Carmel Murphy

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

English Learner families in rural areas have unique experiences in accessing bilingual materials in home languages for literacy learning. This research focused on gathering the perceptions of parents of elementary school ELs regarding the barriers that impede collaboration between public elementary schools and county public libraries for improving the literacy of ELs in rural communities. This qualitative research followed a grounded theory process and community-based research from data collection via interviews with parents of ELs, rural public elementary school educators, and rural county public librarians. Seven participants from Central Minnesota included two bilingual parents of ELs, three educators, and two …

An Electrophysiological Examination Of Attentional Biases To Emotional Faces In Depression And Social Anxiety, Nathan M. Hager

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Cognitive theories have proposed that major depressive disorder (MDD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) involve attentional biases toward and away from specific environmental stimuli. Research has often examined these biases in response to emotional facial expressions, but evidence of attentional biases is mixed. An event-related potential called the N2pc offers advantages over other measures of attentional bias and may clarify conflicting findings. Studies on the N2pc and social anxiety have found consistent results, but there is little work examining depression. Previous N2pc studies are limited by the types of emotional faces they use and by comparing attention for emotional faces …

System-Level Leaders’ Local Control Of Teacher Supervision And Evaluation Under Every Student Succeeds Act, Douglas Wieczorek, Israel Aguilar, Ian M. Mette

Organization and School Leadership Faculty Publications

This article investigates school system leaders’ influence and control over local teacher supervision and evaluation systems (TSES) guided by the United States’ (U.S.) Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Using qualitative, textual document analysis methods, we analyzed 50 states’ ESSA policies to determine the extent to which local education agencies have flexible TSES authority granted by state and federal guidelines. The study findings indicate that a majority of U.S. state-level policies mandate standardized TSES tools and processes at the local district level. In order to optimally meet students’ and teachers’ needs, we recommend that systems-level leaders prioritize community driven visions for …

Lessons Learned: Effective Reading Practices For The Struggling Reader, Maria M. Salaiz, Marie Simonsson, Velma D. Menchaca

Organization and School Leadership Faculty Publications

This study investigated schools who received Reading First (RF) monies to determine if student reading achievement in kindergarten through second grade was a function of the funding earmarked for implementation of the RF practices. The researchers also examined a seven-year reading progress trend to observe changes in Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI) composite means of 37 participating campuses by grade level and by assessment measure from 2006 to 2012. Multiple linear regression and one-way repeated measures outputs were used for evaluating the evidence. A longitudinal progress trend was used over a seven-year period. Both a linear regression and a repeated …

Looking Through Their Lenses: An Analysis Of Virginia Environmental Nonprofits' Roles And Challenges In Shoreline Management For Coastal Resilience, Taiwo C. Olanrewaju Lasisi

School of Public Service Theses & Dissertations

Environmental nonprofit organizations have emerged to attend to the environmental needs of individuals and communities. Some of these needs are usually those that have been neglected, given insufficient attention, or cannot be singularly handled by the government. In advocating for coastal resilience, environmental nonprofits have been identified as actors who address coastal issues like sea-level rise, flooding, and shoreline management.

Shoreline management involves building setbacks and formulating short and long-term defense strategies such as building living shorelines, ripraps, bulkheads, and tree plantings. These strategies formed the basis of coastal defense in coastal zones. Shoreline management is a significant area of …

Ontogeny Of The Paraphalanges And Derived Phalanges Of Hemidactylus Turcicus (Squamata: Gekkonidae), Aaron H. Griffing, Tony Gamble, Aaron M. Bauer, Anthony P. Russell

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Gekkotan lizards of the genus Hemidactylus exhibit derived digital morphologies. These include heavily reduced antepenultimate phalanges of digits III and IV of the manus and digits III–V of the pes, as well as enigmatic cartilaginous structures called paraphalanges. Despite this well-known morphological derivation, no studies have investigated the development of these structures. We aimed to determine if heterochrony underlies the derived antepenultimate phalanges of Hemidactylus. Furthermore, we aimed to determine if convergently evolved paraphalanges exhibit similar or divergent developmental patterns. Herein we describe embryonic skeletal development in the hands and feet of four gekkonid species, exhibiting a range of …

Thank You For Biting: Dispersal Of Beneficial Microbiota Through 'Antagonistic' Interactions, C.G.B. Grupstra, Nathan P. Lemoine, Chelsea N. Cook, Adrienne M.S. Correa

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Multicellular organisms harbor populations of microbial symbionts; some of these symbionts can be dispersed through the feeding activities of consumers. Studies of consumer-mediated microbiota dispersal generally focus on pathogenic microorganisms; the dispersal of beneficial microorganisms has received less attention, especially in the context of 'antagonistic' trophic interactions (e.g., herbivory, parasitism, predation). Yet, this 'trophic transmission' of beneficial symbionts has significant implications for microbiota assembly and resource species (e.g., prey) health. For example, trophic transmission of microorganisms could assist with environmental acclimatization and help resource species to suppress other consumers or competitors. Here, we highlight model systems and approaches that have …

A Longitudinal Study Of Cytochrome P450 2d6 (Cyp2d6) Activity During Adolescence., J Steven Leeder, Andrea Gaedigk, Krista J. Wright, Vincent S. Staggs, Sarah E. Soden, Yvonne S. Lin, Robin E. Pearce

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

CYP2D6 substrates are among the most highly prescribed medications in teenagers and also commonly associated with serious adverse events. To investigate the relative contributions of genetic variation, growth, and development on CYP2D6 activity during puberty, healthy children and adolescents 7-15 years of age at enrollment participated in a longitudinal phenotyping study involving administration of 0.3 mg/kg dextromethorphan (DM) and 4-h urine collection every 6 months for 3 years (7 total visits). At each visit, height, weight, and sexual maturity were recorded, and CYP2D6 activity was determined as the urinary molar ratio of DM to its metabolite dextrorphan (DX). A total …

Progress And Challenges In The Harmonisation Of European Undergraduate Dental Education: A Systematic Literature Review With Narrative Synthesis., Marie Bryce, Daniel Zahra, Lorna Burns, Sally Hanks, Thomas Gale

Peninsula Medical School

Introduction Harmonising education to support workforce mobility has been a policy objective for the European Union. However, alignment across varied national contexts presents challenges in dental education. Methods A systematic literature review with narrative synthesis. Searches of the electronic databases Embase [Ovid]; MEDLINE [Ovid]; Scopus; CINAHL; AMED and PsycINFO were conducted for relevant material published between 2000 and 2019 on undergraduate curricula, quality standards and learning outcomes in dentistry. Results Seventy-six papers met the inclusion criteria. Fifty-three papers were commentaries or editorials, twenty-one were research studies, and two were literature reviews on specific dental subfields. Eighteen of the research studies …

Church-Based Research: Using Theories, Concepts, And Operationalizations, David R. Dunaetz

Great Commission Research Journal

Church-based research requires working with abstract concepts ranging from sin to sanctification. Theories, concepts, and operationalizations allow us to work with these abstractions. Theories are sets of statements describing how specific concepts relate to each other. Concepts are broad ideas that exist in our thinking that can be used to describe phenomena, both within and exterior to the church. If we measure the concepts in our theories among multiple people, we can determine to what degree the relationships in our theories are true or discover under what conditions they are true. Sometimes concepts can be measured directly; other times they …

Not Just The Sinner’S Prayer: People’S Experiences With “Stranger-Evangelism”, Kenneth Nehrbass

Great Commission Research Journal

While churches and Christian concerts are typical loci for evangelism, some Christians also broach the subject of faith with strangers they encounter at their health club, at the beach, or while visiting door-to-door. This study draws from 34 stories of “stranger-evangelism” offered by 11 ministers and laypeople who participated in semi-structured interviews. The central finding of this study is that stranger-evangelism contains a rich variety of experiences that are typical of any ministry: sometimes planned (by proclaiming, inviting, programming, befriending, and serving), and sometimes spontaneously. Participants described the fruit of their efforts along a continuum from rejection to interest, and …

Forming Saints In A Digital Context, Mark R. Teasdale

Great Commission Research Journal

Biblical and scholarly sources agree on the importance of forming Christians to seek after holy living to make them more effective evangelists, such that the ministries of evangelism and spiritual formation are intertwined. They also agree that one of the primary roles of the church is to provide for this formation. However, the practices for doing this have been complicated by the heavy move toward digital ministry because of COVID-19. Congregations can continue this formational work even in highly digital contexts by helping Christians tell their story through lifelogging, providing rituals and disciplines to sanctify time and physical spaces, and …