Some Notable Women Botanists in the VAS: Their Roles in Supporting the Development of the Modern \u3ci\u3eFlora of Virginia\u3c/i\u3e

With the publishing of the 2012 Flora of Virginia by the Foundation of the Flora of Virginia Project, the dream of modern flora for Virginia was realized. This was a goal of the Virginia Flora Committee of the Virginia Academy of Science as well as other groups such as the Virginia Botanical Associates and the Virginia Native Plant Society. The Flora of Virginia and the 2017 Flora of Virginia App were realized with the work, support, and encouragement of many individuals and organizations. This paper focuses on the lives, contributions, and work of six women botanists in the Academy who played important roles in developing the Flora of Virginia as well as continuing its future evolution: Miss Lena Clemmons Artz, Dr. Martha Kotila Roane, Dr. Dorothy Cranford Bliss, Dr. Donna M.E. Ware, Dr. Andrea Weeks, and Ms. Marion Blois Lobstein

William Hanson and the Texas-Mexico Border: Violence, Corruption, and the Making of the Gatekeeper State

An examination of the career of Texas Ranger and immigration official William Hanson illustrating the intersections of corruption, state-building, and racial violence in early twentieth century Texas. At the Texas-Mexico border in the 1910s and 1920s, William Hanson was a witness to, and an active agent of, history. As a Texas Ranger captain and then a top official in the Immigration Service, he helped shape how US policymakers understood the border, its residents, and the movement of goods and people across the international boundary. An associate of powerful politicians and oil company executives, he also used his positions to further his and his patrons\u27 personal interests, financial and political, often through threats and extralegal methods. Hanson’s career illustrates the ways in which legal exclusion, white-supremacist violence, and official corruption overlapped and were essential building blocks of a growing state presence along the border in the early twentieth century. In this book, John Weber reveals Hanson’s cynical efforts to use state and federal power to proclaim the border region inherently dangerous and traces the origins of current nativist politics that seek to demonize the border population. In doing so, he provides insight into how a minor political appointee, motivated by his own ambitions, had lasting impacts on how the border was experienced by immigrants and seen by the nation. [Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/history_books/1061/thumbnail.jp

Comprendiendo la Discapacidad y el Capacitismo: Implicaciones para la Investigación y la Práctica en Educación Física en América del Sur

Este artículo ofrece una discusión crítica sobre diversas interpretaciones dominantes de la discapacidad, predominantemente construidas y desarrolladas desde los puntos de vista del Norte Global. Además, se profundiza en la noción de capacitismo como un concepto definitorio que influye y es influenciado por la comprensión de la discapacidad. Dentro de este discurso, se discute sobre la aplicabilidad, críticas e implicaciones de estas perspectivas y conceptos en el Sur Global, con un enfoque particular en la educación física sudamericana. Se espera fomentar el pensamiento y el avance académico sobre la discapacidad en los contextos del Sur Global, contribuyendo al análisis crítico de cómo estos puntos de vista sobre la discapacidad influyen en nuestro compromiso y provisión de apoyo a las personas con discapacidad en entornos de educación física. (This article offers a critical discussion of various dominant interpretations of disability, predominantly constructed and developed from the viewpoints of the Global North. In addition, it delves into the notion of ableism as a defining concept that influences and is influenced by the understanding of disability. Within this discourse, the applicability, critiques and implications of these perspectives and concepts in the Global South are discussed, with a particular focus on South American physical education. It is hoped to encourage thinking and academic advancement about disability in Global South contexts, contributing to the critical analysis of how these views of disability influence our engagement and provision of support for people with disabilities in physical education settings.

Deep Learning in Reproducing Kernel Banach Spaces

Deep learning has achieved immense success in the past decade. The goal of this dissertation is to understand deep learning through the framework of reproducing kernel Banach spaces (RKBSs), which were originally proposed for promoting sparse solutions. We begin by considering learning problems in a general functional setting, and establishing explicit and data-dependent representer theorems for both minimal norm interpolation (MNI) problems and regularization problems. These theorems provide a crucial foundation for the subsequent results derived for both sparse learning and deep learning. Next, we investigate the essential properties of RKBSs capable of encouraging sparsity in learning solutions. With the proposed sufficient conditions on RKBSs, we develop sparse representer theorems by leveraging previously established representer theorems. Illustrative examples include the sequence space ℓ1(N) and a function space constructed by measures, both of which can enjoy sparse representer theorems. Subsequently, we introduce a hypothesis space for deep learning that employs deep neural networks (DNNs). By treating the DNN as a function of two variables, the physical variable and the parameter variable, we construct a vector-valued RKBS with reproducing kernel formed by the product of the DNN with a weight function. We explore MNI problems and regularization problems considering in this vector-valued RKBS, and develop the corresponding representer theorems for deep learning, demonstrating solutions in the form of DNNs. Finally, motivated by the desire of alleviating potential overfitting and accelerating inference, we examine sparse deep learning models with ℓ1 regularization, which encourages a significant portion of parameters in DNNs to be zero. We provide an iterative algorithm for selecting regularization parameters to ensure that the weights in each layer of the resulting sparse DNN meet a specified sparsity level. Numerical experiments validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in acquiring appropriate regularization parameters to achieve desirable sparse DNNs

Short: Can Citations Tell Us About a Paper\u27s Reproducibility? A Case Study of Machine Learning Papers

The iterative character of work in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) and reliance on comparisons against benchmark datasets emphasize the importance of reproducibility in that literature. Yet, resource constraints and inadequate documentation can make running replications particularly challenging. Our work explores the potential of using downstream citation contexts as a signal of reproducibility. We introduce a sentiment analysis framework applied to citation contexts from papers involved in Machine Learning Reproducibility Challenges in order to interpret the positive or negative outcomes of reproduction attempts. Our contributions include training classifiers for reproducibility-related contexts and sentiment analysis, and exploring correlations between citation context sentiment and reproducibility scores. Study data, software, and an artifact appendix are publicly available at https://github.com/lamps-lab/ccair-ai-reproducibility

Associations Between Combat Exposure, Moral Injury, and Suicidality Among U.S. Military Members: The Moderating Impact of Positive Rumination

Numerous studies have documented the risk for suicide among recent-era veterans with combat experience. Recently, moral injury has emerged as a possible contributor to suicidality in veterans. To that end, no study has approached the combat exposure-moral injury-suicidality link with a focus grounded in positive psychology. Specifically, the present study explored whether positive rumination, or the reflection on positive emotions and moods, may buffer the deleterious effects of potentially traumatic experiences in warzones on moral injury and suicidality. This study was a secondary analysis of 250 current or former U.S. military members (Mage = 33.3 years) who had deployed at least one time as part of their occupational duties. Participants completed an online survey that assessed combat exposure, moral injury, suicidality, and responses to positive affect. Combat exposure, moral injury, and suicidality were all positively associated. In the mediation model, moral injury did not mediate the relationship between combat exposure and suicidality. In the moderated mediation model, positive rumination moderated the indirect effect of combat exposure on suicide via moral injury, as well as all three direct relationships between combat, moral injury, and suicidality. These findings provide much needed insight into the effects of combat on military mental health. Additionally, results suggest positive rumination may serve as a buffer to reduce the associations between combat exposure, moral injury, and suicidality. Implications from the present study may be used to promote awareness of positive affective states and encourage research on positive rumination inducing strategies for combat veterans, at-risk military members, or as prevention strategies for general military populations

Visual Representation Based Creative Problem Solving (CPS) for Microelectronic Course

Microelectronic technologies become the basis for many modern revolutions and require technological innovation and creative transformation of new knowledge into products. This demands our engineering students to be more innovative and creative than ever. It also requires solid resources and strategies to cultivate higher-order thinking skills for engineering students. Presently, microelectronic course covers a wide range of topic areas, including basic semiconductor, pn junction diode, metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) and bipolar junction transistor (BJT) circuits. A traditional teaching strategy in a typical educational setting encompasses instructors delivering lectures to teach the basics and principles of microelectronic devices and circuits, followed by students participating in laboratory sessions. To innovate the teaching strategies, we integrate creative problem-solving components into microelectronic course using ‘visual representation’ activities that allow students to capture or transform engineering problems into visual forms in a speedy but creative way. Particularly, visual representation using digital drawings and paintings is designed to include five essential stages, namely fact-finding, problem-finding, idea-finding, solution-finding and acceptance-finding. A series of CPS exercises in the classroom start with critical reflection in which students identify the problem (fact-finding); reflect on what they have already learned, and then undertake active inquiry and deep research on subject matter (problem-finding); brainstorming (idea-finding) that propels imaginative and divergent thinking from different perspectives; visualization and creation of unorthodox creative solutions (solution-finding); and contextualization linking between creative ideas and the underlying principle of the subject (acceptance-finding). Thus, visual representation-based CPS strategy highlights a divergent thinking phase in which one generates lots of ideas, and then facilitates a convergent thinking phase in which only the most promising ideas are selected for further exploration. We will discuss our initial outcomes, surveys, and assessment and highlight visual representation as a new and authentic experience as creative and thought-provoking processes that allow students to better understand the subject, rather than memorize the equations and key characteristics

Centuripe Ceramic Workshops and their Distinct Funerary Vases

Ancient pottery from Centuripe, Sicily made during the Hellenistic period is an outlier when compared to most other red-figure, black slipped ceramics from Magna Graecia. Most Southern Italian and Sicilian vases have a distinct ornate style to them that was not a long lasting design choice in other Greek ceramic workshops. Funerary vases excavated in Centuripe\u27s tombs provide a large collection of elaborate, decorative pottery that is not replicated anywhere else. Centuripean pottery was tempera painted with bright polychromatic colors. This unique quality of the ceramic ware has led scholars to focus on the color palette, the painted subject matters, and the shape of the pottery. Often overlooked in the study of Centuripe\u27s pottery is how the workshops producing them were structured and manned. Particularly untouched are the relationships between Centuripe\u27s potters and their connections with other artisans. Elizabeth Murphy studies phenomenon in regards to Roman ceramics. These cross-industry ties consider how connections between artisans would have produced a networking of artistic ideas and processes. Adopting this framework, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the workshop environments and artistic motivations and inspirations behind the vases of Centuripe. This paper also breaks down the vase creation process from start to finish to possibly reveal techniques and process phenomena that have not been previously explained. This research provides a new way of understanding and interpreting Centuripe-ware and how artisans worked and collaborated during the 3rd century BC

Shaping and Shaped by Guanyin: Bodhisattva Guanyin as a Site of Individual and Collective Identity Formation

The ambiguity surrounding the bodhisattva Guanyin’s gender has become a site of curiosity for many scholars. The dissemination of miracle tales of Guanyin, such as those written in the Lotus Sutra, describe the bodhisattva’s ability to physically transform into different living beings to best help those in need and is understood by art historians as coinciding with the popular feminization of Chinese (Guanyin) and Japanese (Kannon or Kanzeon) representations of Avalokiteśvara by the 13th century. In this paper, I examine how the migration of Buddhism from Southeast to East Asia significantly transformed Guanyin’s gender appearance, in that the regional and cultural religious landscapes eventually gendered the deity in new ways. Furthermore, I discuss how the gender transformation—or perhaps, transcendence—of Guanyin has become a site of empowerment for devotees, scholars, and those among the general public in their own identity construction across temporal, geographical, and social locations

Prevalence of \u3ci\u3eRickettsia parkeri\u3c/i\u3e in \u3ci\u3eAmblyomma maculatum\u3c/i\u3e Populations of Southeastern Virginia

Amblyomma maculatum has undergone notable expansion northward from its historical region in the Gulf of Mexico, establishing populations along the East Coast into the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, New England, and Midwestern states. Amblyomma maculatum is an aggressive human-biting tick and the primary vector for the bacterium Rickettsia parkeri. R. parkeri is the causative agent of Rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis in humans, a disease similar to but milder than Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. In 1965, several A. maculatum ticks were found in Virginia, but established populations had yet to emerge. By 2010, established populations of A. maculatum were documented across Southeastern Virginia, showing higher R. parkeri prevalence (\u3e50%) compared to the historic region (R.parkeri on the expansion front raises public health concerns and questions about prevalence patterns between historic and newly established A. maculatum populations. This study analyzes Rickettsia parkeri prevalence among Amblyomma maculatum populations in Southeastern Virginia between 2018 and 2023 to determine if prevalence values remain elevated. Amblyomma maculatum DNA extracts were tested using qPCR for Rickettsia spp. DNA, then specifically for Rickettsia parkeri if the first test showed positive results. Our data will determine if prevalence values changed over time as the ticks became established in the region, which allows for potential connections between higher pathogen persistence and the beginning stages of population expansion