Digital Commons Network^™

Statistical Learning For Gene Expression Biomarker Detection In Neurodegenerative Diseases, Jack Kelly

Peninsula Medical School Theses

In this work, statistical learning approaches are used to detect biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases (NDs). NDs are becoming increasingly prevalent as populations age, making understanding of disease and identification of biomarkers progressively important for facilitating early diagnosis and the screening of individuals for clinical trials. Advancements in gene expression profiling has enabled the exploration of disease biomarkers at an unprecedented scale. The work presented here demonstrates the value of gene expression data in understanding the underlying processes and detection of biomarkers of NDs. The value of novel approaches to previously collected -omics data is shown and it is demonstrated that …

Delayed Gastric Emptying In Ivor Lewis Gastro-Oesophagectomy, Ji Chung Tham

Peninsula Medical School Theses

Delayed gastric emptying(DGE) affects 17.5% of Ivor Lewis Gastro-oesophagectomy(ILGO) patients in my unit. DGE diagnosis is varied globally due to definition subjectivity. Definition standardisation along with a diagnostic algorithm will assist clinicians in obtaining accurate diagnoses. Additionally, DGE pathophysiology is unknown and understanding it will guide treatment. 10 patients with and without DGE from our ILGO database between 1/12/2011 to 30/06/2017 had their chest X-ray and nasogastric tube(NG) algorithm from our enhance recovery protocol assessed. DGE was considered if net NG output and/or conduit size was >50% with its performance assessed. To assess treatment, those patients were divided into: patients …

Co2 Uptake Decreased And Ch4 Emissions Increased In First Two Years Of Peatland Seismic Line Restoration, Megan Schmidt, Scott J. Davidson, Maria Strack

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

No abstract provided.

Development And Evaluation Of A Collaborative Care Intervention For Male Prison Leavers With Mental Health Problems: The Engager Research Programme, Richard Byng, Charlotte Lennox, Tim Kirkpatrick, Cath Quinn, Rob Anderson, Sarah Louise Brand, Lynne Callaghan, Lauren Carroll, Graham Durcan, Laura Gill, Sara Goodier, Jonathan Graham, Rebecca Greer, Mark Haddad, Tirril Harris, William Henley, Rachael Hunter, Mike Maguire, Sarah Leonard, Susan Michie, Christabel Owens, Mark Pearson, Sarah Rybczynska-Bunt, Caroline Stevenson, Amy Stewart, Alex Stirzaker, Rod Taylor, Roxanne Todd, Florian Walter, Fiona C. Warren, Lauren Weston, Nat Wright, Jenny Shaw

Peninsula Medical School

Background Many male prison leavers have significant mental health problems. Prison leavers often have a history of trauma, ongoing substance misuse and housing insecurity. Only a minority of prison leavers receive mental health care on release from prison. Objectives The aim of the Engager research programme was to develop and evaluate a theory- and evidence-informed complex intervention designed to support individuals with common mental health problems (e.g. anxiety, depression) and other complex needs, including mental health comorbidity, before and after release from prison. Methods In phase 1, the intervention was developed through a set of realist-informed substudies, including a realist …

Microbial Selenate Detoxification Linked To Elemental Sulfur Oxidation: Independent And Synergic Pathways, L Li, Baogang Zhang, L Li, Alistair G.L. Borthwick

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Anomaly Detection With Vision-Based Deep Learning For Epidemic Prevention And Control, Hooman Samani, Chan Yun Yang, C Li, Chia Ling Chung, S Li

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people were advised to keep a social distance from others. People’s behaviors will also be noticed, such as lying down because of illness, regarded as abnormal conditions. This paper proposes a visual anomaly analysis system based on deep learning to identify individuals with various anomaly types. In the study, two types of anomaly detections are concerned. The first is monitoring the anomaly in the case of falling in an open public area. The second is measuring the social distance of people in the area to warn the individuals under a short distance. By implementing a deep …

On Wave Impact Pressure Variability, Alison Raby, Geoffrey Bullock, Philip Jonathan, David Randell, Colin Whittaker

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

The variability of the largest wave impacts, where nominally identical waves produce significantly different pressures, is widely known. However, the mechanisms are not well understood. Here we provide a review and investigation of factors affecting the variability of wave impact pressures on steep walls, quantifying the range of parameters that have been used in the literature. We then present two investigations: (i) Setup 1 on the effect of structure slope and (ii) Setup 2 on the effects of kinematics variability on pressure variability. Firstly, wave impacts arising from about 250 focused wave groups interacting with three values of wall steepness …

Investigating The Potential Of Eda Data From Biometric Wearables To Inform Inclusive Design Of The Built Environment, Katharine S. Willis, Elizabeth Cross

School of Art, Design and Architecture

No abstract provided.

Heterogeneous Weathering Of Polypropylene In The Marine Environment, John W. Scott, Andrew Turner, Andres F. Prada, Linduo Zhao

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

No abstract provided.

Developing Talent Through Work-Integrated Learning, Poh Sun Seow, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.

Audit Adjustments Matter: What They Reveal About Companies' Financial Reporting, Themin Suwardy, Chu Yeong Lim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study investigates the characteristics, nature and extent of proposed audit adjustments to the financial statements of listed companies in Singapore. Data was gathered from the 2018 to 2020 financial statements of 412 companies, along with views of close to 280 audit committee chairs and heads of finance (or similar designations) on the effectiveness of their companies’ finance function.

Postmaterialism And Corporate Tax Avoidance, Yujia Cui, Jiwei Wang, Kangtao Ye

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper explores how postmaterialism culture influences corporate tax avoidance behavior. Using a proprietary dataset of China tax audits, we find that firms owned by investors from countries with higher postmaterialism values are less likely to engage in tax avoidance behavior in China. In addition, we find some evidence that the negative association between postmaterialism and tax avoidance is more pronounced when tax enforcement is stronger, indicating that national culture and formal institutions act as complements. To check the external validity of our main results, we further use a cross-country sample from 21 countries over 22 years. The evidence from …

Turning The Covid-19 Pandemic Into An Opportunity For Digital Disruption In The E-Commerce Industry: A Case Study Of Digital Commerce Intelligence Pte Ltd, Yuanto Kusnadi, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.

A Bubble Of Protection: Examining Dispositional Optimism As A Psychological Buffer Of The Deleterious Association Between Negative Work-Family Spillover And Psychological Health, Sean T. H. Lee, Bryan K. C. Choy, Jose C. Yong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Demands and stressors from work increasingly encroach upon people’s family lives in modern settings, resulting in poorer familial relationships and impaired psychological health. The current study proposed and examined dispositional optimism as a potential psychological buffer of the deleterious impact of negative work-to-family spillover (WFS) on psychological health. Based on a sample of employed midlife adults in the United States (N = 1,252) drawn from a large and nationally representative dataset, MIDUS 3, we found that dispositional optimism significantly moderated the relationship between negative WFS and subjective well-being, even after controlling for a variety of potential confounds. However, this moderation …

A Harbour In The Country, A City In The Sea: Infrastructural Conduits, Territorial Inversions And The Slippages Of Sovereignty In Sino-Sri Lankan Development Narratives, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper adopts infrastructure as a lens through which new understandings of the inter-relationships between territory and sovereignty can be advanced. It argues that inverting the terrestrial assumption of territory can lead to “slippages” of sovereignty in which territorial sovereignty is indirectly claimed through the assertion of governance rights. For the purposes of this paper, I explore these inversions through the reclaiming of land from the ocean, and the removal of land by the ocean. Drawing on ethnographic research exploring the effects of China-backed infrastructure megaprojects in Sri Lanka, these territorial inversions are explored, respectively, through the Port City Colombo …

Subjective Social Class And Life Satisfaction: Role Of Class Consistency And Identity Uncertainty, Bek Wuay Tang, Jacinth Jia Xin Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Drawing on a recent perspective that inconsistent class identities can negatively impact psychological outcomes, the current research explored if the relative benefit of higher subjective social class for life satisfaction would differ depending on whether it is consistent with one’s objective social class. In Study 1, across two independent samples from Singapore (n = 1,045) and the United States (n = 492), higher subjective social class predicted higher life satisfaction more strongly among those high in objective social class, but less strongly among those low in objective social class. In Study 2, these patterns were replicated in another large U.S. …

Producing Industrial Pigs In Southwestern China: The Rise Of Contract Farming As A Coevolutionary Process, Forrest Qian Zhang, Hongping Zeng

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The literature on contract farming (CF) has to date focused on how outside capital uses CF to vertically integrate non-capitalist producers into agro-industrial value chains. We argue that in places where multiple dynamics of capitalist growth co-exist, CF relationships can also emerge between different types of capitalist producers that are already in capitalist production using other organizational forms. In this situation, the well-studied drivers that fuel the spread of CF become less consequential; the emergence of CF is instead more contingent on the complex interactions between producers and the specific conditions and events in the local environment. We conceptualize the …

The Associations Between Poor Antibiotic And Antimicrobial Resistance Knowledge And Inappropriate Antibiotic Use In The General Population Are Modified By Age, Huiling Guo, Zoe Jane-Lara Hildon, David Chien Boon Lye, Paulin Tay Straughan, Angela Chow

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Objectives: Understanding factors influencing inappropriate antibiotic use can guide the design of interventions to improve antibiotic practices and reduce antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Methods: A nationally representative cross-sectional survey (N = 2004) was conducted between November 2020 and January 2021. Knowledge of antibiotic use and AMR using the World Health Organization’s Multi-Country AMR Survey questionnaire, and antibiotic practices were examined. Multivariable logistic regression was performed to identify factors associated with inappropriate antibiotic use and examine effect measure modifications. Results: After adjusting for potential confounding, poor knowledge of antibiotic use was associated with a 3x increased odds of inappropriate antibiotic use in …

Financial Capacity And The Demand For Audit Quality, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald J. Lobo, Pingui Rao, Heng Yue

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Prior research documents that financial capacity could be positively or negatively associated with the demand for audit quality. We re-examine this relation using changes in local real estate prices as exogenous shocks to corporate financial capacity. Using auditor size, auditor industry specialisation, and auditor fees as measures of audit quality, we find robust evidence that an increase (decrease) in financial capacity significantly reduces (increases) the demand for audit quality, and that this relation is more pronounced when firms are more financially constrained, when external monitoring by institutional investors and financial analysts is weaker, and when there is more negative news …

Media And Peer Culture: Young People Sharing Norms And Collective Identities With And Through Media, Sun Sun Lim

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

When young people interact, they absorb the peer culture that underpins and sustains their relationships with each other. Peer culture encompasses norms and conventions, shared interests and activities, and the unique modes of communication deployed in the afore-mentioned elements. The ways in which young people integrate their media consumption into their peer culture is the focus of this chapter. Specifically, it examines how young people incorporate media content into their peer interactions and appropriate a variety of communication platforms to socialize with their peers, thus generating distinctive traits, norms, practices, codes and shared identities that make up their unique peer …

Screenlife Capture: An Open-Source And User-Friendly Framework For Collecting Screenomes From Android Smartphones, Andrew Z. H. Yee, Ryan Yu, Sun Sun Lim, Kwan Hui Lim, Tien Tien Anh Dinh, Lionell Loh, Andre Hadianto, Miguel Quizon

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

As our interactions with each other become increasingly digitally mediated, there is growing interest in the study of people’s digital experiences. To better understand digital experiences, some researchers have proposed the use of screenomes. This involves the collection of sequential high-frequency screenshots which provide detailed objective records of individuals’ interaction with screen devices over time. Despite its usefulness, there remains no readily available tool that researchers can use to run their own screenome studies. To fll this gap, we introduce ScreenLife Capture, a user-friendly and open-source software to collect screenomes from smartphones. Using this tool, researchers can set up smartphone …

A Comparison Between The Eu Green Taxonomy And South Africa’S Green Taxonomy, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Andreas G. F. Hoepner, Anh Vu

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Both South Africa and the European Union have introduced a common language and a clear definition of what is ‘sustainable’ through a taxonomy, a classification of environmentally sustainable economic activities, at the core of their sustainable finance ecosystem. Sustainable finance taxonomies provide transparency on what can be considered green and, hence, help investors, public authorities and policy makers make informed decisions, avoid green washing, and scale up sustainable investment. The purpose of the present report is to provide a comparison between the EU Taxonomy Regulation1 , including the respective EU Climate Delegated Act 2 and South Africa’s Green Finance Taxonomy3 …

Impact Investing Via Affiliation With Academia, Ngos, Or Other Collaborations?, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Andreas G. F. Hoepnner, Yanan. Lin, Fabiola Schneider

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

While ESG investing has become mainstream, impact investment has yet to be institutionalised and legitimized. We investigate how impact investment firms claim legitimacy compared to their ESG peers. Impact investment is still a nascent field and suffers from a heavier burden of proof. Legitimacy has been recognised as a strategy to overcome the liability of newness. Combining private market data with statements made by investment firms on their websites we investigate how they claim legitimacy. We find that impact investment firms are more likely to claim to be involved in partnerships, specifically with academia and corporations than their ESG peers. …

Russian Logics And The Culture Of Impossible: Part Ii: Reinterpreting Algorithmic Rationality, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Anya Yermakova, Liesbeth De Mol

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article reinterprets algorithmic rationality by looking at the interaction between mathematical logic, mechanized reasoning, and, later, computing in the Russian Imperial and Soviet contexts to offer a history of the algorithm as a mathematical object bridging the inner and outer worlds, a humanistic vision that we, following logician Vladimir Uspensky, call the “culture of the impossible.” We unfold the deep roots of this vision as embodied in scientific intelligentsia. In Part I, we examine continuities between the turn-of-the-twentieth-century discussions of poznaniye—an epistemic orientation towards the process of knowledge acquisition—and the postwar rise of the Soviet school of mathematical logic. …

Associations Between Eight Earth Observation-Derived Climate Variables And Enteropathogen Infection: An Independent Participant Data Meta-Analysis Of Surveillance Studies With Broad Spectrum Nucleic Acid Diagnostics, Josh M. Colston, Benjamin F. Zaithcik, Hamada S. Badr, Eleanor Burnett, Syed Asad Ali, Ajit Rayamajhi, Syed M. Satter, Daniel Eibach, Ralf Krumkamp, M Imran Nisar, Anita K. M. Zaidi, Zulfiqar Ahmed Bhutta

Department of Paediatrics and Child Health

Diarrheal disease, still a major cause of childhood illness, is caused by numerous, diverse infectious microorganisms, which are differentially sensitive to environmental conditions. Enteropathogen‐specific impacts of climate remain underexplored. Results from 15 studies that diagnosed enteropathogens in 64,788 stool samples from 20,760 children in 19 countries were combined. Infection status for 10 common enteropathogens—adenovirus, astrovirus, norovirus, rotavirus, sapovirus, Campylobacter, ETEC, Shigella, Cryptosporidium and Giardia—was matched by date with hydrometeorological variables from a global Earth observation dataset—precipitation and runoff volume, humidity, soil moisture, solar radiation, air pressure, temperature, and wind speed. Models were fitted for each pathogen, accounting …

Jiann-Ping Hsu College Of Public Health Magazine, Georgia Southern University

College of Public Health: News & Publications

• Message from the Dean: Stuart H. Tedders, PhD
• One-On-One: Marshall in Conversation with Aslan
• Alumni Feature: Improving the Body Art Industry
• Truth is Better than Fiction
• An Invisible Danger
• New Development Council
• The Period Equity Movement
• Averitt Award Winner and Together United
• Our Students Around the World
• Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion
• Center for Addiction Recovery Making an impact: Scholarship recipient named
• Karl E. Peace Center for Biostatistics and Survey Research Working together: Biostatistics collaborations
• Center for Public Health Practice and Research Improving Health Outcomes
• Faculty and Students
• Office of Practice and Research
• College
• Photos

Accessibility In Software Practice: A Practitioner's Perspective, Tingting Bi, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy, Thomas Zimmermann, Denae Ford

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Being able to access software in daily life is vital for everyone, and thus accessibility is a fundamental challenge for software development. However, given the number of accessibility issues reported by many users, e.g., in app reviews, it is not clear if accessibility is widely integrated into current software projects and how software projects address accessibility issues. In this article, we report a study of the critical challenges and benefits of incorporating accessibility into software development and design. We applied a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach for gathering data from 15 interviews and 365 survey respondents from 26 countries across …

Predicting Customer Loyalty In The Mobile Banking Setting: An Integrated Approach, Nhuong Bui, Zach Moore, Hayden Wimmer, Long Pham

Computing: Faculty Publications

This study uses a novel theoretical approach that combines two multidimensional service quality models that focus on customer satisfaction, perceived value, and customer loyalty as outcomes of service quality in the context of mobile banking. Additionally, the study assesses the potential moderating effects of switching costs between mobile banking service quality and customer loyalty. The study found a strong direct effect between service quality, perceived value, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. The moderating effect of switching costs was found to be inconsequential to customer loyalty. The study demonstrates that financial institutions should focus on building and maintaining functional, secure mobile banking …

Charitable Organizations In Singapore: From Clan Based To State Facilitated Endeavors, Hang Wu Tang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Singapore, with a five million population, has a vibrant charitable sector with over 2000 registered charities attracting approximately USD$2.18 billion in annual donations. How did Singapore’s charitable sector achieve its current level when it has been, in the past, segregated along mainly religious, race and clan-based communities? This paper explores this question by piecing together the current ecosystem, regulatory and tax infrastructure which facilitates the charitable sector in Singapore. Central to the development of the charitable sector has been the Singapore government’s role of being a gatekeeper, regulator and enabler of charities. In analysing the government’s role in the charitable …

Improperly Obtained Evidence In Criminal Proceedings: An Updated Framework, Siyuan Chen, Zhi Jia Koh, Jian Wei Joel Soon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The 2012 amendments to the Evidence Act “significantly broadened the admissibility criteria for expert evidence”; at the same time, the judicial discretion to deny admissibility of relevant expert opinion evidence was also introduced. This article considers the key developments pre- and post-amendments, and in doing so provides an updated framework for prosecutors and defence counsel alike to admit and challenge expert opinion evidence in criminal proceedings. Since it complements earlier articles in this series on similar fact and hearsay evidence, readers are assumed to be broadly familiar with the features of the Evidence Act, such as its admissibility paradigm, the …