Digital Commons Network^™

Evaluation Of A 2-1-1 Telephone Navigation Program To Increase Cancer Control Behaviors: Results From A Randomized Controlled Trial, Maria E Fernandez, Lara S Savas, John S Atkinson, Katherine Ball Ricks, Lynn N Ibekwe, Inimfon Jackson, Philip E Castle, David Jobe, Sally W Vernon

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

PURPOSE: to evaluate the effectiveness of a telephone navigation intervention for increasing use of cancer control services among underserved 2-1-1 callers.

DESIGN: Randomized controlled trial.

SETTING: 2-1-1 call centers in Houston and Weslaco, Texas (located in the Rio Grande Valley near the Mexican border).

PARTICIPANTS: 2-1-1 callers in need of Pap test, mammography, colorectal cancer screening, smoking cessation counseling, and/or HPV vaccination for a daughter (n = 1,554). A majority were low-income and described themselves as Black or Hispanic.

INTERVENTION: Participants were randomly assigned to receive either a cancer control referral for the needed service(s) with telephone navigation from a …

Gaseous Air Pollutants And Dna Methylation In A Methylome-Wide Association Study Of An Ethnically And Environmentally Diverse Population Of Us Adults, Katelyn M Holliday, Rahul Gondalia, Antoine Baldassari, Anne E Justice, James D Stewart, Duanping Liao, Jeff D Yanosky, Kristina M Jordahl, Parveen Bhatti, Themistocles L Assimes, James S Pankow, Weihua Guan, Myriam Fornage, Jan Bressler, Kari E North, Karen N Conneely, Yun Li, Lifang Hou, Pantel S Vokonas, Cavin K Ward-Caviness, Rory Wilson, Kathrin Wolf, Melanie Waldenberger, Josef Cyrys, Annette Peters, H Marike Boezen, Judith M Vonk, Sergi Sayols-Baixeras, Mikyeong Lee, Andrea A Baccarelli, Eric A Whitsel

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Epigenetic mechanisms may underlie air pollution-health outcome associations. We estimated gaseous air pollutant-DNA methylation (DNAm) associations using twelve subpopulations within Women's Health Initiative (WHI) and Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) cohorts (n = 8397; mean age 61.3 years; 83% female; 46% African-American, 46% European-American, 8% Hispanic/Latino). We used geocoded participant address-specific mean ambient carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NO2; NOx), ozone (O3), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) concentrations estimated over the 2-, 7-, 28-, and 365-day periods before collection of blood samples used to generate Illumina 450 k array leukocyte DNAm measurements. We estimated methylome-wide, subpopulation- and race/ethnicity-stratified pollutant-DNAm associations in …

Clinical Epidemiology Of Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacterales In The Greater Houston Region Of Texas: A 6-Year Trend And Surveillance Analysis, Bekana K Tadese, Charles Darkoh, Stacia M Desantis, Osaro Mgbere, Kayo Fujimoto

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVES: Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales (CRE) remain an urgent public health priority in the United States. CRE poses a major threat to patients in healthcare and a potential risk to the community. This study examined the epidemiological trends, clinical, and microbiological data of CRE in the Greater Houston region of Texas.

METHODS: A multi-institutional retrospective observational study was conducted using surveillance data collected from 2015 to 2020. Predictors of incidence rates of CRE were determined by a negative binomial regression fit using a generalized estimation equation.

RESULTS: Over a 6-year period, 4236 CRE cases were reported, of which Klebsiella pneumoniae accounted for …

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Adolescent Mental Health And Substance Use, Jeff R Temple, Elizabeth Baumler, Leila Wood, Shannon Guillot-Wright, Elizabeth Torres, Melanie Thiel

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to determine whether COVID-19-induced financial impact, stress, loneliness, and isolation were related to perceived changes in adolescent mental health and substance use.

METHODS: Data were from Baseline (2018) and Wave 3 (2020; mean age = 14.8; 50% female) of 1,188 adolescents recruited from 12 Texas public middle schools as part of a randomized controlled trial. Participants were primarily Black (23%), Latinx (41%), Asian (11%), and White (9%). We assessed mental health and substance use (Baseline and Wave 3) and pandemic-related physical interaction, loneliness, stress, family conflict, and economic situation (Wave 3).

RESULTS: COVID-19-induced …

Informed Consent For Placebo-Controlled Trials: Do Ethics And Science Conflict?, Hope A Feldman, James A Feldman, Charles C Miller, Garrett Walsh, Jon E Tyson

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

The use of a placebo has been considered the best method for controlling bias in a prospective randomized clinical trial and provides the most rigorous test of treatment efficacy for evaluating a medical therapy. Placebos commonly produce clinically important effects particularly in studies where the primary outcomes are subjective. Yet the potential beneficial or harmful effects of placebos are often not addressed in designing a clinical trial, calculating the sample size, seeking consent, or interpreting clinical trial results. In this manuscript, we use an actual study to indicate three approaches that might be considered in seeking informed consent for placebo-controlled …

Pivoting The Biosafety Program In Response To Covid-19: Recommendations Of Key Services And Tasks To Consider For The Next Pandemic, Robert J Emery, Scott J Patlovich, Kristin G King, Janelle Rios

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

INTRODUCTION: With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a rapid adjustment of work tasks was necessary for many biosafety programs (and other safety programs) to address drastic shifts in workload demands amid pandemic-related shutdowns and subsequent needs for supporting COVID-19-related safe work protocols, diagnostic testing, research, vaccine development, and so forth. From a program management standpoint, evaluating and understanding these tasks were critically important to ensure that appropriate support and resources were in place, especially during such unprecedented times of rapid change and significant impact to normal life and routine.

METHODS: Described here are examples of how the biosafety program …

Association Of Social Risk Factors With Mortality Among Us Adults With A New Cancer Diagnosis, Matthew P Banegas, John F Dickerson, Zhiyuan Zheng, Caitlin C Murphy, Reginald Tucker-Seeley, James D Murphy, K Robin Yabroff

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

This cohort study examines the associations of multiple social risk factors with mortality risk among patients newly diagnosed with cancer in the US.

Agreement Between Sars-Cov-2 Pcr Test Results Using Nasopharyngeal And Mid-Turbinate Specimens Among Asymptomatic Working-Age Adults, Judy Wendt Hess, Faiyaz Bhojani, Derrick Cameron, Mary Freire De Carvalho, Fayaz Momin

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to determine whether mid-turbinate specimens reliably detect active infection in asymptomatic adults undergoing regular COVID-19 PCR testing.

METHODS: Qualitative agreement between 2481 paired nasopharyngeal and mid-turbinate PCR results was assessed. Mean cycle threshold values for each positive result were evaluated as an indicator of active infection.

RESULTS: Overall agreement between nasopharyngeal and mid-turbinate tests was 98.4%. Positive percent agreement was 37.2%, and negative percent agreement was ~100%. Test pairs with lower cycle thresholds (≤30 and ≤25) reached 67% and 100% positive percent agreement, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS: SARS-CoV-2 infections with high viral loads were detected …

Assessing Associations Between Insecure Income And Us Workers' Health: An Ipums-Meps Analysis, Robert D Thomas, John W Davis, Paula M Cuccaro, Gretchen L Gemeinhardt

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Gig economy compensation policy initiatives, such as California Prop 22, are increasing the number of US workers receiving piece rate pay (PRP) and other forms of insecure income. However, there is limited evidence about how this trend affects people's health. Using data from the 2008-19 IPUMS Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we examined associations between insecure compensation and US adults' self-reported overall health as well as psychological distress. We report significant associations with three types of insecure income - PRP, hourly, and daily pay - on overall health and psychological distress. These effects were robust to adjustment for suspected confounders, …

The Public Right To Education, Matthew P. Shaw

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Public education is "the most important function of state and local government" and yet not a "fundamental right or liberty." This Article engages one of constitutional law's most intractable problems by introducing "the public right to education" as a doctrinal pathway to a constitutional right to education process in three steps. First, it identifies that the otherwise right-to-education foreclosing case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, only contemplated education as a fundamental right or liberty interest. Second, by identifying public education as a due process protected property interest, this Article presents a viable pathway for circumventing Rodriguez. Third, mindful …

Reimagining Community Engagement To Increase Resilience To Climate Change In El Punto Neighborhood, Salem, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Sweet, Fabián Torres-Ardila, Daniela Bravo, Leandra Jara

Gastón Institute Publications

In November 2021, the Mauricio Gastón Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston partnered with the Woods Hole Group (WHG) to develop a community outreach strategy for the Climate Change Deep Dive Model, Alternative Analysis, and Targeted Outreach & Engagement project in the Point/Palmer Cove neighborhood (El Punto), in the city of Salem, MA. El Punto, including its residents, workers, infrastructure, and development areas, is particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts (such as sea level rise, storm surge, precipitation, and heat waves). Researchers from the Gaston institute engaged El Punto residents to:

• Increase the community’s knowledge of current and future …

Latinas In The Labor Market, Lorna Rivera, Vishakha Agarwal, Phillip Granberry

Gastón Institute Publications

In Massachusetts, the share of Latinas in the overall population has been rapidly increasing. From 2000 to 2019, the number of Latinas increased by 81.5%1 even as the number of Non-Latina women declined by about 5.8% during that same period. The share of Non-Latina White women in the Massachusetts female population dropped from approximately 82% in 2000 to 71% in 2019.

This report offers an in-depth look at the difference between the median wage income and other labor market outcomes of Latina and Non-Latina women in the Massachusetts workforce. (A great majority of Non-Latina women workers in Massachusetts are White …

Book Review: Brookfield, S. (2017). Becoming A Critically Reflective Teacher, Second Edition. Jossey-Bass. Isbn 978-1-119-04970-8, Hardcover, 286 Pages., Edith Van Der Boom

International Christian Community of Teacher Educators Journal

A review of Brookfield, S. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. ISBN 978-1-119-04970-8, hardcover, 286 pages.

Antecedents Of High Performance Work Practices In Smes: An Attention-Based View, Javier Martínez-Del-Río, Pingshu Li, James P. Guthrie

Management Faculty Publications

Relative to the large body of work in the broader strategic HRM (SHRM) literature, knowledge about determinants of SMEs’ approaches to HRM remains limited. We argue that heterogeneity in the use of high performance work practices (HPWPs) is influenced by top managers’ exposure and attention to information obtained via environmental scanning. Invoking an attention-based view (ABV), we develop hypotheses suggesting that competition tracking, participation in trade associations, and social network embeddedness will be associated with greater use of HPWPs. We also propose direct and moderating roles for top managers’ perceptions of competitive intensity. We test our hypotheses using a database …

Can You Escape? Using Mobile App Escape Games To Create A Holistic Experiential Learning Process Online, Mai P. Trinh

Management Faculty Publications

Mobile app escape games are excellent tools to create an experiential learning process in online contexts. Through the act of solving puzzles to escape the rooms, students experience a process in which they need to discover new information and clues, adjust their strategies repeatedly, and become more aware of the way they learn. Their emotional and behavioral reactions when they encounter difficulties can shed light on their learning identity and learning flexibility. The experiential learning cycle is complete with the addition of after-game reflection, debrief, and discussion. Escape games are versatile and can be used to teach a variety of …

Igg4-Related Interstitial Nephritis Ranges From Kidney Mass To Acute Kidney Injury, Mai Elzieny, Wei Li, Hassan D. Kanaan, Ping Zhang

Conference Presentation Abstracts

Context: IgG4-related interstitial nephritis (IRIN) can present as either a renal mass or with acute kidney injury (AKI). The goal of this study was to present our 4 IRIN cases with different clinical scenarios.

Design: Over the past 5 years, we identified 4 cases of IRIN. Each case was evaluated.

Results: Case 1 involved a 60-year-old man with a 3-cm kidney mass. The core biopsy revealed storiform fibrosis and increased IgG4-positive plasma cells (>30 per high-power field), thus diagnosed as IRIN. Case 2 involved a 69-year-old man with medical history of polymyalgia rheumatica and low complements who developed AKI …

Social Attention In Realistic Work Environments, Theodore Charles Masters-Waage

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Social attention – the process by which individuals select which aspect of the social world to mentally process – is a key antecedent to all organisational behaviour in groups. This central role of attention has long been appreciated by organisational theorists, but our understanding of this core cognitive process has been hampered by a lack of empirical evidence. To create a method through which organisational scholars can study social attention, this dissertation combines cognitive science measures of attention with recent innovations from social and applied psychology using virtual reality to study naturalistic social behaviour (Chapter 1). This method is then …

A Gpu-Based Machine Learning Approach For Detection Of Botnet Attacks, Michal Motylinski, Áine Macdermott, Farkhund Iqbal, Babar Shah

All Works

Rapid development and adaptation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created new problems for securing these interconnected devices and networks. There are hundreds of thousands of IoT devices with underlying security vulnerabilities, such as insufficient device authentication/authorisation making them vulnerable to malware infection. IoT botnets are designed to grow and compete with one another over unsecure devices and networks. Once infected, the device will monitor a Command-and-Control (C&C) server indicating the target of an attack via Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. These security issues, coupled with the continued growth of IoT, presents a much larger attack surface for …

El Leñador, September 2022, El Leñador Staff

El Leñador Newspaper

El Leñador is an English and Spanish newspaper produced by Humboldt State University students. Our staff cover and provide news to Latinx and other diverse communities on campus and in Humboldt County. We are committed to providing relevant news and expanding the representations and stories told about people of color and other marginalized groups. Our work helps create more social, political and cultural diversity in local media.

El Leñador es un periodico en español y inglés producido por estudiantes de la Universidad Estatal de Humboldt. Nuestro personal cubre y provee noticias a la comunidad Latinx y otras comunidades diversas en …

Maybe We Are Eachother's Replica, Yirui Rita Wang, Special Collections, Fleet Library

9th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2023

Entry for the 9th Annual Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. Opening Reception Thursday, March 02, 2023, Fleet Library, Main Reading Room. Juror: Andre Lee Bassuet.

Private Market Impact Investing Firms: Ownership Structure And Investment Style, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Andreas G. F. Hoepner, Yanan Lin

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Impact investing and ESG investing are specific “ethical” investing types integrating social, environmental, and moral values with financial goals. Despite receiving heightened scholarly attention, the difference between impact and ESG investing is largely unexamined, and it is not clear how they differ from conventional investment. To explain the differences between ESG, impact, and conventional investing, this paper draws on a dataset of over 8000 private market investment (PMI) firms. It compares impact, ESG, and conventional investment across firm characteristics, investment preference, and ownership. Results show that impact investors are more likely to be owned by the government, focusing on agriculture, …

Infrared Thermography In The Built Environment: A Multi-Scale Review, Miguel Martin, Adrian Chong, Filip Biljecki, Clayton Miller

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

The paper presents a review on major contributions in infrared thermography to study the built environment at multiple scales. To elaborate the review, hundreds of studies conducted between the 1980s and 2020s were first selected based on their relevance to the scope. Afterward, the most relevant contributions were classified and chronologically sorted. From the classification, it is observed that most reviewed studies were conducted to evaluate the thermal performance of buildings or detect their defects using images collected by an infrared camera. At the same time, a considerable number of studies used thermal images obtained by a satellite to observe …

Desert Arcologies And Path Dependencies, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

In Phoenix, Arizona last year, the local high temperature topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit on 145 days, a new record. Of those 145, 53 days saw top temperatures above 110 and 14 days exceeded 115 – also new peaks. Taken together, these numbers strongly suggest that to live out 2020 in Phoenix was to inhabit an environment sliding towards a painful, and perhaps even hellish, new baseline. Of course, numbers are known to occlude at least as much as they reveal. But in the case of Arizona’s largest metropolitan area, they’re useful for framing a certain conventional wisdom about the place: …

Learning Improvement Heuristics For Solving Routing Problems, Yaoxin Wu, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang, Andrew Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent studies in using deep learning to solve routing problems focus on construction heuristics, the solutions of which are still far from optimality. Improvement heuristics have great potential to narrow this gap by iteratively refining a solution. However, classic improvement heuristics are all guided by hand-crafted rules which may limit their performance. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework to learn the improvement heuristics for routing problems. We design a self-attention based deep architecture as the policy network to guide the selection of next solution. We apply our method to two important routing problems, i.e. travelling salesman …

Novation And Advance Consent, Kwan Ho Lau

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Professor Goode once observed that “Novation need not be left to ad hoc agreement; it is open to the parties to provide for it in advance and in particular to establish a contractual mechanism by which novation takes place automatically on the occurrence of a designated act or event”. This deceptively straightforward proposition is examined in the present article. It explores the legal footing for, and the risks in adopting a pristine version of, the proposition, and considers possible safeguards that may be incorporated within the process of scrutiny, if in any case there arises concern over the effectiveness of …

User Guided Abductive Proof Generation For Answer Set Programming Queries, Avishkar Mahajan, Martin Strecker, Meng Weng (Huang Mingrong) Wong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

We present a method for generating possible proofs of a query with respect to a given Answer Set Programming (ASP) rule set using an abductive process where the space of abducibles is automatically constructed just from the input rules alone. Given a (possibly empty) set of user provided facts, our method infers any additional facts that may be needed for the entailment of a query and then outputs these extra facts, without the user needing to explicitly specify the space of all abducibles. We also present a method to generate a set of directed edges corresponding to the justification graph …

The Efficacy And Safety Of Adding Olanzapine To Triple Drugs Regimen To Prevent Chemotherapy-Induced Nausea And Vomiting: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis Of Rcts, Sharanabasayyaswamy B. Hiremath, Srinivas L. Devendrappa

Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacy Research

Chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) is a complication of highly emetogenic chemotherapy (HEC) agents. The present meta-analysis was conducted to quantify and analyze the efficacy and safety of adding olanzapine to a Neurokinin Receptor Antagonist (NKRA) based triple-drug regimen in preventing HEC-induced CINV. Electronic database searches in PUBMED and Cochrane library was conducted using MeSH search terms “olanzapine” and “chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting.” Randomized or cross-over trials comparing the efficacy of “olanzapine + NKRA based triple-drug regimen” vs. “placebo + NKRA based triple-drug regimen” in patients of age > 18 years with any malignancy receiving HEC were considered under inclusion criteria. …

Nonprofit Spotlight: Rise Up School Of Dance

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Mission

To harness the power of dance, mentorship and community to empower students to realize their unique value and develop physical, mental, emotional and social skills that equip them to become the people they are meant to be.

Presence Of Malnutrition And Severe Acute Malnutrition Among Children In South Asia, Madison Johnson

Ballard Brief

South Asia is home to 23% of the global population and has the largest prevalence of stunting in any region in the world. Severe acute malnutrition is a frequent cause of death in children under 5 globally. While sustainable development goals have brought more people out of poverty in the last 50 years, a disproportionate number of children remain malnourished. These children are typically found in developing countries, with a large burden existing in South Asia. Young children are most susceptible to the effects of malnutrition as they are at a stage of increased physical and cognitive development. There are …

Damage Detection And Damage Localization In Bridges With Low-Density Instrumentations Using The Wave-Method: Application To A Shake-Table Tested Bridge, Mehran Rahmani, Xintong Ji, Sovann Reach Kiet

Mineta Transportation Institute

This study presents a major development to the wave method, a methodology used for structural identification and monitoring. The research team tested the method for use in structural damage detection and damage localization in bridges, the latter being a challenging task. The main goal was to assess capability of the improved method by applying it to a shake-table-tested prototype bridge with sparse instrumentation. The bridge was a 4-span reinforced concrete structure comprising two columns at each bent (6 columns total) and a flat slab. It was tested to failure using seven biaxial excitations at its base. Availability of a robust …