Digital Commons Network^™

21st Century Identity Politics And Social Protest: How The Dynamics Of Race And Gender Influence Black Women's Decision To Run For Congress, An Exploratory Study, Susan J. Telingator

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

While women represent half the world’s population, they are underrepresented globally in government (UN Women, accessed February 27, 2022). In the United States, women’s representation is particularly low and women of color face greater levels of exclusion than white women (Reflective Democracy Campaign, 2018). During the 2018 mid-term elections there was a significant increase in the number of women running for office of all races, particularly Black women (CAWP, 2019). Black women have historically held less than 5% of elected executive offices, including Congress and state legislatures (CAWP, 2018d), even though they comprise 13.1% of the total U.S. population (CAWP, …

Professional Identity Development Of Asian American & Pacific Islander Aanapisi Staff, Sara Boxell Hoang

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

In spite of a swiftly growing AAPI undergraduate student population, higher education staff remain predominantly White with AAPIs significantly underrepresented within the field. The underrepresentation of AAPI professional staff is a problem not only because it may represent a lack of a career pipeline for AAPIs entering the workforce, but it also negatively impacts the large population of AAPI students who struggle to access and succeed in higher education. Contrary to prevalent stereotypes and misconceptions, many AAPI undergraduates are first-generation college students, come from low-income backgrounds, and struggle to obtain bachelor’s degrees (Maramba, 2011). Although AAPIs in predominately White fields …

Associations Between Concepts Of The Family Management Style Framework, And Measures Of Child Adherence To Treatment For Heterozygous Familial Hypercholesterolemia, Heather Harker Ryan

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Background: Heterozygous Familial Hypercholesterolemia (HeFH) is an underdiagnosed, autosomal dominant, monogenic condition affecting ~1:250 individuals in the United States (U.S.), resulting in cardiovascular events 10-20 years earlier than in unaffected peers.

Sample: Fifty-one parents of youth aged 2-18 years followed for HeFH in a pediatric specialty clinic.

Purpose: Assess parental perceptions of HeFH, child adherence to treatment, and parenting in HeFH-affected households.

Methods: A cross-sectional, descriptive, and correlational survey study congruent with elements of the Family Management Style Framework (FMSF). Pearson’s and Spearman’s correlations assessed linear relationships between parentally observed HeFH treatment adherence measures, parenting style, and parental perceptions of …

The Role Of Physical Activity And Gender As Moderators For The Relationship Between Insomnia And Depression, Claire E. Wickersham

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the association between insomnia and depressive symptoms among middle-aged and older adults and to investigate whether gender or physical activity moderates this relationship. Method: This study used nationally representative data from the 2016 and 2018 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and binomial logistic regression was used to estimate models. Regression models for risk of depressive symptoms (2018) were based on a longitudinal model with time-lagged indicators of insomnia, levels of physical activity, and covariates (2016). Results: Analyses showed that participants who reported having insomnia in 2016 were more …

Meta-Algorithms In Machine Learning, Vishnu Pendyala

Open Educational Resources

This presentation explores how to make the best of models impacted by bias and variance. Meta-learning minimizes loss. Ensemble methods, including Bagging, Adaboost, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and Stacking, are discussed. These methods perturb data (X or Y) using techniques like bootstrap sampling, k-fold sampling, weighted sampling, and random subspaces. Models are generated in parallel or sequentially, with aggregation strategies such as mean, mode, weighted response, and metamodel. The presentation also touches upon deep learning and one-shot learning, and explains how distances become less meaningful in high dimensions.

More details: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/315184

Video Recording: https://ieeetv.ieee.org/video/meta-algorithms-in-machine-learning

Differential Effects Of Dietary Macronutrients On The Development Of Oncogenic Kras-Mediated Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma, Liang Zhu, Juntao Ji, Jianjia Ma, Dan Wang, Muyun Liu, James Xianxing Du, Rong Chen, Wei Hou, James L Abbruzzese, Craig D Logsdon, Vincent W Yang, Yongde Luo, Weiqin Lu

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

KRAS mutations are prevalent in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) and are critical to fostering tumor growth in part by aberrantly rewiring glucose, amino acid, and lipid metabolism. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for pancreatic cancer. Corroborating this epidemiological observation, mice harboring mutant KRAS are highly vulnerable to obesogenic high-fat diet (HFD) challenges leading to the development of PDAC with high penetrance. However, the contributions of other macronutrient diets, such as diets rich in carbohydrates that are regarded as a more direct source to fuel glycolysis for cancer cell survival and proliferation than HFD, to pancreatic tumorigenesis remain …

Cardiovascular Outcomes In Aortopathy: Gentac Registry Of Genetically Triggered Aortic Aneurysms And Related Conditions, Kathryn W Holmes, Sheila Markwardt, Kim A Eagle, Richard B Devereux, Jonathan W Weinsaft, Federico M Asch, Scott A Lemaire, Cheryl L Maslen, Howard K Song, Dianna M Milewicz, Siddharth K Prakash, Dongchuan Guo, Shaine A Morris, Reed E Pyeritz, Rita C Milewski, William J Ravekes, H C Dietz, Ralph V Shohet, Michael Silberbach, Mary J Roman

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: The GenTAC (Genetically Triggered Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm and Cardiovascular Conditions) Registry enrolled patients with genetic aortopathies between 2007 and 2016.

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to compare age distribution and probability of elective surgery for proximal aortic aneurysm, any dissection surgery, and cardiovascular mortality among aortopathy etiologies.

METHODS: The GenTAC study had a retrospective/prospective design. Participants with bicuspid aortic valve (BAV) with aneurysm (n = 879), Marfan syndrome (MFS) (n = 861), nonsyndromic heritable thoracic aortic disease (nsHTAD) (n = 378), Turner syndrome (TS) (n = 298), vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (vEDS) (n = 149), and Loeys-Dietz syndrome …

The Coercion Of The Trial Penalty, Kristen C. Akin

Student Theses

Prosecutors, defendants, and defense attorneys must make decisions as to whether to accept a plea offer or proceed to trial every day. Approximately 95% of state and federal convictions result from guilty pleas (Redlich et al., 2017; Thaxton, 2013; Gazal-Ayal & Tor, 2012; Redlich & Shteynberg, 2016; Edkins, 2011; Weatherly & Kehn, 2013; Helm et al., 2018; Gregory et al., 1978). Some estimate this number to be as high as 97% to 99% (Redlich & Bonventre, 2015; Helm et al., 2018). It is also estimated that every two seconds a defendant pleads guilty (Redlich & Bonventre, 2015). In 1980, 19% …

Elisa Validation Method For The Detection Of Ketamine In Hair, Daria A. Centonza

Student Theses

An ELISA method was developed and validated to detect ketamine in human hair samples. Ketamine is an anesthetic drug that causes memory loss, dissociative sensations, and hallucinations. Due to these adverse effects, ketamine is a common drug used in drug facilitated sexual assaults (DFSAs). It is very important to be able to detect the substances used in DFSAs over a longer period of time due to the delayed reporting of these crimes. Victims, often out of fear and from the sedative/memory loss effects of the drugs, tend to report these crimes when it is too late to use urine and …

Economic Security From An Asset Perspective, William Elliott Iii

Center for Social Development Research

hat is economic security, and what policies can help more families achieve it?

In talking about the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt provided a vision for what economic security should look like in America, a vision that CSD Faculty Director William Elliott III elaborates in this essay. To be secure, Elliott notes, families require enough to live by and something to live for; that is, they require income and assets. Elliott makes the case that policy has a vital role to play in creating and sustaining this security.

This Perspective presents remarks given by CSD Faculty Director William Elliott III …

We Clerked For Justices Scalia And Stevens. America Is Getting Heller Wrong., Katherine A. Shaw, John Bash

Online Publications

In the summer of 2008, the Supreme Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to gun ownership. We were law clerks to Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, and Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the lead dissent.

Educational Data Mining For Predicting University Students' Performance, To Enhance University Admission Criteria, Youssef Amr Naga

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to propose and evaluate possible predictors of success for incoming university students to the American University in Cairo (AUC) who wish to enroll in its engineering programs, by considering their overall grade point average (GPA) at graduation as the measure of their success (output variable). This study is composed of two phases. First, available university admission variables; i.e., gender, high school diploma, high school score, and proficiency level in the English language (the language of instruction at AUC) at the time of application are evaluated as a predictor of students’ performance using five different data mining techniques. …

Inconsistency Crisis And Reformative Proposals Of Investor-State Arbitration System- Umbrella Clauses Considered, Abdallah Elsayed

Theses and Dissertations

The main purpose of investment treaties is to provide guarantees and protections for the investors in order to maintain the flow of foreign direct investment. As a consequence, when disputed, an adjudicator confronts a dilemma of figuring out the actual intention that the parties consented to. As for umbrella clauses are concerned, an interpreter falls into a loop to attain whether the parties consented to prioritize investor’s interest and elevate any contractual breach to the level of a treaty breach, or to consider the state’s regulatory power. The root could be traced to the interpretation process itself. Human conduct differs …

Integrating Circular Economy And Industry 4.0 Into Sustainable Supply Chain Management: A Dynamic Capability View, H Lu, G Zhao, S Liu

Plymouth Business School

Air pollution may be involved in spreading dengue fever (DF) besides rainfalls and warmer temperatures. While particulate matter (PM), especially those with diameter of 10 μm (PM10) or 2.5 μm or less (PM25), and NO2 increase the risk of coronavirus 2 infection, their roles in triggering DF remain unclear. We explored if air pollution factors predict DF incidence in addition to the classic climate factors. Public databases and DF records of two southern cities in Taiwan were used in regression analyses. Month order, PM10 minimum, PM2.5 minimum, and precipitation days were retained in the enter mode model, and SO2 minimum, …

Integrating Circular Economy And Industry 4.0 For Sustainable Supply Chain Management: A Dynamic Capability View, Haiyan Lu, Guoqing Zhao, Shaofeng Liu

Plymouth Business School

Circular economy (CE) and Industry 4.0 are recent business buzzwords that help organizations to maintain a circular flow and optimize the use of resources with technological supports to improve sustainability practice. Transition towards CE and Industry 4.0 is promising and yet challenging. As such, the aim of this research is to investigate how to integrate CE and Industry 4.0 in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) in order to improve operational efficiency and sustainability performance. This study provides an analysis of the dynamic changes of drivers and barriers when integrating CE and Industry 4.0 and their related applications in operations and …

The Interconnection Of The Vestibular And Oculomotor Systems Analyzed In Healthy Young Adults By Examining Postural Sway, Cassandra Martin

Theses

In order to study the human brain in a non-invasive way, the vestibular and oculomotor systems have been analyzed simultaneously. To achieve this, an eye movement and balance assessment was conducted for 29 (23 male; 21.6 ± 3.8 years) healthy participants with no history of concussions, brain injuries, vertigo, migraines, brain surgeries, eye surgeries, or amblyopia. The tasks consisted of eyes open, eyes closed, horizontal saccades, vertical saccades, vergence jumps, horizontal vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR), and vertical VOR. Each task was completed in two stances: feet shoulder width apart and feet together. Distance, velocity, sway area, center of pressure (COP) frequency, …

Regulation Of Activity Patterns In Astyanax Mexicanus Cavefish, Udodirim Nwosu

Theses

Organisms commonly modulate their behavioral activity in relation to the 24-hour solar cycle. This modulation of behavior is driven by a combination of responses to external cues in the environment, such as light/dark visual signals, and internal pattern generators that can persist in the absence of external cues. However, there are animals that live in caves or in the deep sea that are isolated from solar circadian cues. How these animals regulate their behavioral activity in relation to external and internal rhythms is an open question in neuroscience that may help us to understand the mechanisms that other animals, including …

Actions Against Racism: Bringing Together Trauma-Informed Practices, Social-Emotional Learning, And Racial Socialization To Combat Racism In Schools, Danielle R Hatchimonji, Kira Branch, Danika Perry, Tia N Barnes

Department of Pediatrics Faculty Papers

Racism is a social determinant of health with dire consequences for the health, education, and mental health of students of color. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop and test evidence-based strategies to combat racism in schools. In response to this need, our team has developed a multi-tiered school-based intervention to build capacity for combatting racism in educators, students, and families. The "Actions Against Racism" intervention synthesizes three evidence-based practices: trauma-informed practices, social-emotional learning (SEL), and racial socialization. The multiple tiers of intervention aim to cultivate skills for combatting individual and structural racism in educators, families, and students across …

Integrated Circuits Parasitic Capacitance Extraction Using Machine Learning And Its Application To Layout Optimization, Mohamed Saleh Abouelyazid Saleh

Theses and Dissertations

The impact of parasitic elements on the overall circuit performance keeps increasing from one technology generation to the next. In advanced process nodes, the parasitic effects dominate the overall circuit performance. As a result, the accuracy requirements of parasitic extraction processes significantly increased, especially for parasitic capacitance extraction. Existing parasitic capacitance extraction tools face many challenges to cope with such new accuracy requirements that are set by semiconductor foundries (< 5% error). Although field-solver methods can meet such requirements, they are very slow and have a limited capacity. The other alternative is the rule-based parasitic capacitance extraction methods, which are faster and have a high capacity; however, they cannot consistently provide good accuracy as they use a pre-characterized library of capacitance formulas that cover a limited number of layout patterns. On the other hand, the new parasitic extraction accuracy requirements also added more challenges on existing parasitic-aware routing optimization methods, where simplified parasitic models are used to optimize layouts.

This dissertation provides new solutions for interconnect parasitic capacitance extraction and parasitic-aware routing optimization methodologies in order to cope with the new accuracy requirements of advanced process nodes as follows. …

Implicating The System: Judicial Discourses In The Sentencing Of Indigenous Women By Elspeth Kaiser- Derrick, Arunita Das

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

In Implicating the System: Judicial Discourses in the Sentencing of Indigenous Women, Elspeth Kaiser-Derrick critically engages with sentencing decisions involving Indigenous women and the application of Gladue reports during sentencing. With an impressive selection of pre-sentence reports and case law, Kaiser-Derrick examines how the histories of victimization are recorded and filtered through legal narratives.

American Contagions: Epidemics And The Law From Smallpox To Covid-19 By John Fabian Witt, Stephanie Cho

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

At the time of writing, the coronavirus known as COVID-19 has swept across the world and affected nearly every aspect of daily life as we know it. Canada has had approximately 20 thousand deaths and about 780 thousand total cases and the United States has had over 400 thousand deaths and more than 25 million total cases.

Salivary Immunity Of Elite Collegiate American Football Players Infected With Sars-Cov-2 Normalizes Following Isolation, Joshua Granger, Eunhan Cho, Kevin Lindsey, Nathan Lemoine, Derek Calvert, Jack Marucci, Shelly Mullenix, Hollis O’Neal, Brian A. Irving, Neil Johannsen, Guillaume Spielmann

School of Medicine Faculty Publications

The impact of COVID-19 on systemic immunity in the general population has been well characterized, however the short-term effects of COVID-19 infection on innate salivary immunity in elite-level athletes are unknown. Therefore, this study aimed to determine whether elite college football athletes had altered salivary immunity following the CDC-recommended isolation post-SARS-CoV-2 infection. Salivary samples were obtained from fourteen elite football players who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 (n = 14), immediately after CDC-recommended isolation (average days = 14 ± 2 days) and fifteen controls who remained uninfected with SARS-CoV-2. Biomarkers of innate salivary immunity (sIgA and alpha-amylase), antimicrobial proteins (AMPs, i.e., …

Integrating Deep Learning And Hydrodynamic Modeling To Improve The Great Lakes Forecast, Pengfei Xue, Aditya Wagh, Gangfeng Ma, Yilin Wang, Yongchao Yang, Tao Liu, Chenfu Huang

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

The Laurentian Great Lakes, one of the world’s largest surface freshwater systems, pose a modeling challenge in seasonal forecast and climate projection. While physics-based hydrodynamic modeling is a fundamental approach, improving the forecast accuracy remains critical. In recent years, machine learning (ML) has quickly emerged in geoscience applications, but its application to the Great Lakes hydrodynamic prediction is still in its early stages. This work is the first one to explore a deep learning approach to predicting spatiotemporal distributions of the lake surface temperature (LST) in the Great Lakes. Our study shows that the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network, …

Unconscious Bias In United States Marine Corps Leadership Doctrine: Examining Microaggressions Through Document Analysis, Patrick Butler

Dissertations

This dissertation employed a document analysis format to examine Marine Corps leadership education doctrine for microaggressions. The United States Marine Corps (Marine Corps or USMC) is the military service with the least diverse officer cadre in terms of sex, gender identity, and race. The study results show a pattern of repeating unconscious bias-related content within the Marine Corps’ documents. Such patterns can negatively affect minority members in terms of their health, acceptance, and performance within the organization. The results also document an overriding bias-culture which puts Marine Corps leadership in a dilemma of trying to encourage conformity to traditional organizational …

Correlates Of Health Literacy And Perceptions Of Burden Among Caregivers Of Persons Diagnosed With Chronic Illnesses, Mubarak Aldawsare

Dissertations

Background/Rationale: Greater attention is needed on factors effectively supporting caregivers because poor well-being of caregivers can hamper overall patient outcomes. Lack of awareness of caregiver burden has implications for healthcare systems globally. Caregivers may encounter various levels of burden as a result of providing long-term care to individuals diagnosed with one or more chronic illnesses. Caregivers with inadequate health literacy are more likely to experience feelings of uncertainty, and as a result, caregiver burden. Little is known about the impact of the health literacy of caregivers on the level of burden when providing care to individuals with complex care …

The Dialogical Language Of Law, Julen Etxabe

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

We live in a dialogical world. The normative environment around us is many-voiced. Legal activities like drafting, negotiating, interpreting, judging, invoking, and protesting the law take place in dialogical encounters, all of which presuppose entrenched forms of social dialogue. And yet, the dominant modes of thinking about the law remain monological. How can we bring our legal conceptions into alignment with the dialogical world in which we live?

The present article follows in the footsteps of a Bakhtinian dialogical theory of language that challenges the roots of contemporary positivist conceptions of law and language underpinning large swathes of legal academia …

Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity To Maintain Inequality By Nancy Leong, Zara Narain

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

In her first book Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality (“Identity Capitalists”), Nancy Leong gifts readers the reflective space—and a new vocabulary—to process the interplay between power, identity, and inequality that animates interpersonal relationships and institutional practices embedded in American life.

Discovery Of Potent Bet Bromodomain 1 Stereoselective Inhibitors Using Dna-Encoded Chemical Library Selections, Ram K Modukuri, Zhifeng Yu, Zhi Tan, Hai Minh Ta, Melek Nihan Ucisik, Zhuang Jin, Justin L Anglin, Kiran L Sharma, Pranavanand Nyshadham, Feng Li, Kevin Riehle, John C Faver, Kevin Duong, Sureshbabu Nagarajan, Nicholas Simmons, Stephen S Palmer, Mingxing Teng, Damian W Young, Joanna S Yi, Choel Kim, Martin M Matzuk

Duncan NRI Faculty and Staff Publications

BRDT, BRD2, BRD3, and BRD4 comprise the bromodomain and extraterminal (BET) subfamily which contain two similar tandem bromodomains (BD1 and BD2). Selective BD1 inhibition phenocopies effects of tandem BET BD inhibition both in cancer models and, as we and others have reported of BRDT, in the testes. To find novel BET BD1 binders, we screened >4.5 billion molecules from our DNA-encoded chemical libraries with BRDT-BD1 or BRDT-BD2 proteins in parallel. A compound series enriched only by BRDT-BD1 was resynthesized off-DNA, uncovering a potent chiral compound, CDD-724, with >2,000-fold selectivity for inhibiting BRDT-BD1 over BRDT-BD2. CDD-724 stereoisomers exhibited remarkable differences in …

Lee Hwok Aun And Christopher Choong, Eds. Inequality And Exclusion In Southeast Asia: Old Fractures, New Frontiers. Singapore: Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2021. 344 Pp., John N. Abletis

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

Excerpt from Book Review: Inequality has been a significant concern for policy makers, academics, development workers, and the general public because it affects political stability, the enjoyment of human rights, efficient utilization of national resources, human and economic development, and on a more personal level, the life chances of individuals. Hence, any attempt that aids in understanding how inequality and its various determinants and consequences work in society is a welcome contribution not just to scholarship on inequality and stratification but also to efforts in mitigating their multi-layered and interacting effects. It is in this light that one can appreciate …

Economics And Catholic Social Teaching: A Pedagogy Of Navigating Rationality, Self-Interest, Altruism, And Reciprocity, Joselito T. Sescon, Philip Arnold P. Tuaño, Rachel Joyce Marie O. Sanchez, Jaime A. Acevedo, Stephanie Ann Puen

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

Proceeding from the dialogue between the tradition of Catholic social teaching (CST) and socio-economic development, this paper addresses the perceived irreconcilability of the neoclassical microeconomic model of rational self-interested individuals with that of the altruistic and sacrificing behavior called for by the Christian church. To confront this research problem, we present the challenging task of teaching economics in a Jesuit and Catholic university that consciously promotes Ignatian values and pedagogy. Highlighting the internal dialogue within the economics discipline on the differing views of self-interest versus community interest, we tackle how economic theory and application have arduously grappled with these two …