One work : a rhizomatic treatise on the creative act

This work is a phenomenological and formal investigation into the tensions between the human tendency toward creativity and the institutional structures that control how that work is shared, including museums, galleries, public-art-funding government, social media, and the Academy. It is common for artists to be expected to work between assignments or bodies of work, as it were—artifacts of a creative process with a beginning, middle, and end. In this model, the initial goal is to execute an idea, and the final goal is to publicly display the work when it is finished, often to exchange it for capital. I propose a different model, where one’s artistic life is devoted to the experience of inquiry and experimentation, where artifacts may become secondary to the process, and where the art objects are tools as much as the media that may have made them. These objects are impermanent manifestations of inquiry and may become assembled and disassembled without heartbreak or fuss, always in service to the process of learning. I find points of intersection and departure between my own multiple modalities as an artist, thinker, and educator and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly as they address the concepts of, assemblage, multiplicity, repetition, accumulation, and ritual, and their metaphor for non-hierarchy, the rhizome. In a rhizomatic structure, all points connect through nodes, but removing a node doesn’t destroy the connectivity of every other node. In contrast to arboreal thinking, rhizomatic thinking tends toward weighing the connections between things as more powerful than the things themselves

Interventions to Increase Osteoporosis Screening in Patients with Seizure Disorder on Antiepileptic Medications

People with epilepsy (PWE) are at above-average risk for fracture due to the biochemical bone changes that result from the use of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs). Osteoporotic fractures can lead to considerable morbidity and mortality while simultaneously having negative effects on healthcare cost. There is no recommended routine screening for osteoporosis in people who are at high risk for osteoporotic fractures for other reasons except being female and post-menopausal

Photo of STEM Classroom dedication

Photo of STEM classroom in Dixon-Patterson Hall at ECSU, dedicated to Johnny L. Houston, PhD on April 11, 2024

Student Perspectives On Chemistry Support Course, Success, and Barriers

There is a student success gap for underrepresented, first-generation, and transfer students shown in their increased DFW rates for General Chemistry 1. However, they demonstrate higher levels of resilience in continuing through a chemistry degree path, suggesting the first General Chemistry course is the barrier. A co-requisite support course (BASE) designed to reduce barriers in these categories by Building Student Assurance, Security, and Engagement is one solution to increase student success in General Chemistry. Appalachian State University began offering a one-hour support course in Fall 2021 to increase success in the first semester of General Chemistry. The course offers support with both chemistry material and success skills through activities designed to increase student skills and involvement. Data collected over five semesters shows the % DFW rates of students enrolled in the support course (34.4%) are similar to all students in the first-semester General Chemistry course (35.4%). However, the % DFW rates are lower than the historical rates for students in underrepresented groups, which indicates the support course may increase student success. Current research examines the student perspective to understand how the support course prompts student growth with data collection in both the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters

Improving Education Provided to Patients on the Interaction of Sugammadex and Hormonal

Background: Sugammadex is a medication used to rapidly reverse the effects of rocuronium and vecuronium by encapsulating and physiologically inactivating it. Although sugammadex has a high affinity for rocuronium and vecuronium, it can also encapsulate progesterone and estrogen, thereby decreasing the effectiveness of progesterone hormonal contraceptives and increasing the risk of unintended pregnancy. It is recommended that patients on hormonal contraceptives use a non-hormonal birth control backup method for seven days after receiving sugammadex. Approximately 65% of women of reproductive age in the United States are currently using some form of hormonal contraception (CDC, 2020). The percentage of ambulatory surgical cases specifically performed on women also increased by 1.1% between the years 2000 and 2014 (CDC, 202). This increase in the utilization of sugammadex and increase in female surgical cases suggests that the number of patients affected by this medication interaction will likely continue to increase. Patients on hormonal contraceptives who receive sugammadex perioperatively are provided education on this interaction, however, this education is routinely provided postoperatively, following the administration of anesthesia. Following anesthesia, a patient’s memory may be impaired, and they may not remember the instructions provided. Providing patient education preoperatively improves patient recall. Purpose: The purpose of this quality improvement project was to improve patient?recall of provided education on the interaction of sugammadex and hormonal contraceptives by having anesthesia providers provide this education prior to the administration of anesthetic medications. Methods: Patients using hormonal contraceptives that were anticipated to receive sugammadex perioperatively were provided patient education by an anesthesia provider preoperatively in addition to routine postoperative instructions provided by the nursing staff. Patients on hormonal contraceptives that received sugammadex were contacted postoperatively by phone to assess their recall of provided education. Results: Thirty-three percent of patients receiving postoperative instructions only on the interaction of sugammadex and hormonal contraceptives were able to recall receiving that education. In patients also provided this education preoperatively, 23% were able to recall receiving that education. Recommendations and Conclusion: Patient education provided preoperatively by the anesthesia provider did not improve patient recall of receiving this education. Further study is recommended to determine the best method(s) of educating patients on the implications of the interaction between sugammadex and hormonal contraceptives

Data augmentation based methods for estimating the parameters of the Feller-Pareto Distribution: Theory and applications

In income and wealth data modeling Pareto distribution and its several variants play an important role. Both univariate and multivariate variations of this model have been extensively used as a suitable model for various non-negative socio-economic variables, for pertinent details, see Arnold (2015). In this article, weconsider the most general Feller-Pareto (FP, in short) distribution, which subsumes all four types of Pareto distributions and show that it can be represented as a mixture of a conditional generalized gamma and an unconditional gamma distribution. Using this strategy, we consider a data augmentation based method (under the envelope of Bayesian paradigm) to estimate the parameters of the FP distribution. This mixture representation allows us to easily derive conditional Jeffery’s type non informative priors. For illustrative purposes, one data set is considered to exhibit the utility of the proposed method

North Carolina's Special Libraries Revisited

When North Carolina Libraries published its fall 1967 issue surveying the status of libraries inthe state, Dr. Doralyn J. Hickey, an Assistant Professor of Library Science at the University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill, contributed “Special Libraries: A ‘Coming Force’ in NorthCarolina.” She had every reason to choose this optimistic title. There had been a steady rise inspecial libraries since the North Carolina Library Commission first began to record them in the1930s, and their membership had seen a substantial increase during subsequent decades. Hickeyattributed this growth to the expansion of the state’s industries, which needed dedicatedrepositories and subject specialists to serve the needs of individual businesses and further thestate's social and economic goals. The recent establishment of the North Carolina chapter of theSpecial Library Association in 1966 added legitimacy to these unique repositories and anchoredthe state to its national parent organization. In this environment, it was easy for Hickey toimagine a world where special librarians across North Carolina would join together, throughshared interests and better communication, to achieve “maturity and self-confidence as aprofession.” However, this positivity belied her deep frustration with ongoing challenges yet tobe sufficiently addressed within the field. These included the absence of a clear definition of a“special library,” problematic methods of statistical documentation, and deficient library staffing.Her concerns were prophetic, as these issues would plague the field for years and continue to doso today

Beceasing : onto-pedagogical dis-integration

This project concerns pedagogy and ontology and lies at the intersection of a deep study of two figures, two texts: Calvin Warren’s nihilism/Ontological Terror and Plato’s idealism/Republic. I notice in these works the presence of guardian—which is to say, following the Greek, phulaks—figures. The phulakes of Plato’s Republic, as the philosopher enlists them, find themselves bound to serve and protect the wall being, the boundary between what is and what is not. As such, following Warren, the work that these phulakes do is fundamentally antiblack, inasmuch as it is fundamentally anti-what-is-not. Throughout these pages, I suggest that phulakes as such linger into the contemporary era, at the very least as ‘humans,’ following Warren, and, following Plato and how he introduces them, as onto-pedagogues and onto-mythagogues. I admit this problematic tendency in my self: I am a teacher, I am a storyteller, I am a phulaks figure. And as far as I can tell, I can’t not be. Both Plato and Warren point to and through this ontological deadlock, an ontometaphysically concretized world and inescapably human way of moving in and viewing the world. Humans, pedagogues, storytellers, and phulakes do not have a choice as to whether or not they and their work reifies ontological antiblackness, only how. How am I to respond to this lock, this boundary? I set up this problem that does not have a solution and write as a practice of sitting with the tension that such a conundrum engenders. As the project proceeds, the personal emerges (this project is about ‘me’)—throughout my life, I have noticed patterns regarding how pedagogical and mythagogical figures have pointed me in relation to this antiblack wall and law of being that there is no getting beyond, for me. I wonder, then, in this world full of figures that tell me that I am, and that I become, what might it mean if I admit to my self that I am simultaneously ceasing to be

Stereoselective lactone synthesis via chiral Brønsted acid catalysis

Molecular chirality plays a key role in chemical and biological reactivity of molecules. The handedness of a particular molecule, for example, can have drastic effects on its biological or pharmaceutical properties. Synthesis of stereoenriched chiral molecules is challenging, especially molecules containing all-carbon quaternary centers. Desymmetrizations are a method that takes advantage of a prochiral moiety to generate stereoenriched compounds without the drawbacks of other classical asymmetric methods. Lactones are synthetically important target moieties, as they are replete throughout natural products and biological chemistry spaces. Indeed, chiral lactones are key to the functioning of several bioactive molecules, including molecules with anti-cancer activity. Methods for the synthesis of chiral lactones, then, present an important challenge for synthetic chemists. This work builds on previous methods for the synthesis of chiral lactones via desymmetrizations. It introduces new stereoselective uses for known reactions, and builds on methodology to develop a cascade reaction that streamlines our synthetic pathway. Finally, this work delineates a new co-catalytic cascade desymmetrization enhances the rescues the reactivity of chiral phosphoric acid catalysts. These methods add new tools in the synthetic chemist’s toolbox for synthesis of chiral molecules, and particularly chiral lactones

Weight training practices and perspectives among cadet women at a senior military college

Weight training (WT) has been consistently shown to improve muscular ability among women, better preparing them to meet the demands of modern military service and overcome certain physiological challenges. Unfortunately, current training methods do not prioritize WT in most military populations, and women typically participate in WT at rates 20-30% lower than their male peers. The purpose of this study was to identify factors that influence WT participation among cadet women enrolled at a senior military college (SMC) to inform future programming, curriculum, facilities, or policies. First, a survey was administered to cadet women (n = 92) to characterize their WT participation and perceptions. Then, cadet women (n = 11) were interviewed to explore their perspectives on barriers, facilitators, and strategies for participation. Although WT is not often featured in twice per week institute-led physical training, 77% of cadet women reported participating in WT at least 2 days/wk and 49% reported = 3 days/wk. Athletes and women who planned to pursue military service after graduation reported higher rates of WT. Analysis of the interviews illuminated three themes: building reputation, “it’s on multiple fronts,” and “having to adapt.” WT was valued to support military readiness and build reputation in a male-dominated sphere emphasizing physicality. Cadet women’s perceived competence and strength were tied to reputation concerns. Time and space constraints included high academic course loads and extracurricular responsibilities associated with SMCs, coupled with limited facilities and equipment. Based on the views of cadet women in this study and low reported enrollment of women in current WT offerings, it is recommended that the institution provide additional educational resources and opportunities (e.g., workshops or women-only courses) as early as possible in a cadetship