Spartan Daily, March 11, 2025

Volume 164, Issue 20https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2025/1019/thumbnail.jp

The Post-War Lives of Amputee Civil War Veterans

In August 1865, Ora D. Walbridge sat down with a pen in his left hand to produce a specimen of his best business penmanship. Three years earlier, a gunshot had left Walbridge’s right arm paralyzed. When he submitted his penmanship specimen, he joined a unique group of Civil War veterans: the self-proclaimed “Left-Armed Corps.” This talk examines the lives of these veterans in the decades following the conflict to highlight the lasting resonance of missing limbs during national reconciliation. Demographic and biographical information provides insights into how the veterans’ lives were shaped by their service and their wounds.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/1064/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, March 5, 2025

Volume 164, Issue 18https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2025/1017/thumbnail.jp

A morphological cell atlas of the freshwater sponge Ephydatia muelleri with key insights from targeted single-cell transcriptomes

How animal cell types, tissues, and regional body plans arose is a fundamental question in EvoDevo. Many current efforts attempt to link genetic information to the morphology of cells, tissues and regionalization of animal body plans using single-cell sequencing of cell populations. However, a lack of in-depth understanding of the morphology of non-bilaterian animals remains a considerable block to understanding the transitions between bilaterian and non-bilaterian cells and tissues. Sponges (Porifera), one of the earliest diverging animal phyla, pose a particular challenge to this endeavour, because their body plans lack mouths, gut, conventional muscle and nervous systems. With a goal to help bridge this gap, we have studied the morphology, behaviour and transcriptomics of cells and tissue types of an easily accessible and well-studied species of freshwater sponge, Ephydatia muelleri. New features described here include: a polarized external epithelium, a new contractile sieve cell that forms the entry to incurrent canals, motile cilia on apopyle cells at the exit of choanocyte chambers, and non-motile cilia on cells in excurrent canals and oscula. Imaging cells in vivo shows distinct behavioural characteristics of motile cells in the mesohyl. Transcriptomic phenotypes of three cell types (cystencytes, choanocytes and archaeocytes) captured live indicate that cell-type transcriptomes are distinct. Importantly, individual archaeocytes show a range of transcriptomic phenotypes which is supported by the distinct expression of different genes by subsets of this cell type. In contrast, all five choanocyte cells sampled live revealed highly uniform transcriptomes with significantly fewer genes expressed than in other cell types. Our study shows that sponges have tissues whose morphology and cell diversity are both functionally complex, but which together enable the sponge, like other metazoans, to sense and respond to stimuli

Factors of Belonging of Male Speech Language Pathologists From Underrepresented Racial and/or Ethnic Minorities

Current literature lacks the perspectives of speech language pathologists (SLPs) who identify as both male and from an underrepresented racial and/or ethnic minority (UREM.) This research provides multiple viewpoints on how the intersection of race and gender affects sense of belonging in the profession of speech language pathology. This project takes a phenomenological approach utilizing snowball sampling and semi-structured interviews to discuss factors of belonging with four UREM male SLPs using interpretative analysis, bracketing, and member checks. The project shares four individual profiles in which participants shared their sense of belonging, inclusion and exclusion experiences, and the individual factors that shape and affect their clinical practice. Combined, 16 factors were identified across the four participants. The individual profiles and varied myriad factors identified by these four UREM male SLPs provide practical and theoretical insights about sense of belonging. Such profiles are heterogeneous and create an opportunity for the speech language pathology profession to reflect on its current inclusionary (and exclusionary) practices for individuals who are intersectional (by race/ethnicity and gender) minorities

SECURED DATA STORAGE MANAGEMENT WITH DEDUPLICATION IN CLOUD COMPUTING AND LOCAL GPT INTEGRATION

Exponential growth in cloud computing has brought enormous changes in data storage and processing, but also raised several questions on the security, privacy, and efficient storage of data. This report provides a dual-focused approach toward solving these challenges. First, we try to build an application securely and efficiently using data deduplication and Proxy Re-Encryption for optimization of storage and enabling secure data sharing. Deduplication ensures that redundant data is removed before encryption for maximum efficiency in storage, while PRE enables the safe sharing of encrypted data by re-encrypting the keys for specified recipients without the leakage of sensitive information. We further propose developing a local version of GPT. LocalGPT is a solution for privacy and being absolutely offline to interact with documentation in a privacy-preserving manner. Indeed, all data is local to the user’s device. By combining Large Language Models and Document Ingestion with local embedding generation using the Instructor Embedding model and storing them in a Chroma vector database, one can efficiently and securely create and query contextual documents without relying on an external server

Keep it Open, Keep it Ours: The Importance of Community-Owned Infrastructure in Open Access Book Publishing

When research is under attack, it is tempting to retreat into familiar ways of working and publishing. Big organisations might seem to offer security, and paywalls might look like protection against surveillance and stifling oversight. This is misguided. Paywalls create silos, dividing haves and have-nots. They also create gated points of access: the organisation that controls the gate controls the content. Open access (OA), by contrast, liberates content from post-publication censorship and suppression, whether by publisher or government, and equality of access creates opportunities for collective action. But openness alone is not sufficient: we need community support for open publication routes to create an information ecosystem that is robust against authoritarian threats. I will present Open Book Publishers (https://www.openbookpublishers.com/), an academic-led, non-profit, independent OA book press, as a case study in resilient, community-led, open publishing systems for OA books. The two core components in its success are: a funding model that harnesses community support rather than state or individual-fee-based funding to pay for OA publication; and participation in community-owned, non-profit infrastructure, built by the Copim community (to which we belong) supporting our own publishing and that of others. I will explain how collective funding makes it more difficult to critically threaten OBP financially, and how, by using open, community-owned infrastructure to fund, disseminate, and archive our OA books, we rely on infrastructure that the scholarly community collectively controls. I will conclude by arguing that open, interoperable infrastructures and robust community networks are the best way to safeguard the information ecosystem against control by large organizations, whether they be corporations or governments