Measuring a Rifle’s Recoil Using Wireless Dynamics Sensor System

https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/student_scholarship_posters/1076/thumbnail.jp

City of Jefferson Curry Creek Water Supply Watershed: Estimate of Existing and Projected Impervious Cover and Assessment of Watershed Protection Provisions

The Land Use Clinic, in conjunction with the River Basin Center, helped the City of Jefferson to protect its drinking water supply. The Land Use Clinic wrote municipal legislation to reduce impervious cover (roads, parking lots, buildings and sidewalks) and minimize runoff, which diminishes water quality by filling streams with pollutants and increasing sedimentation, increases the need for expensive water treatment and impacts aquatic habitat

SMBH Formation via Gas Accretion in Nuclear Stellar Clusters

Black holes exceeding a billion solar masses have been detected at redshifts greater than six. The rapid formation of these objects may suggest a massive early seed or a period of growth faster than Eddington. Here we suggest a new mechanism along these lines. We propose that in the process of hierarchical structure assembly, dense star clusters can be contracted on dynamical time scales due to the nearly free-fall inflow of self-gravitating gas with a mass comparable to or larger than that of the clusters. This increases the velocity dispersion to the point that the few remaining hard binaries can no longer effectively heat the cluster, and the cluster goes into a period of homologous core collapse. The cluster core can then reach a central density high enough for fast mergers of stellar-mass black holes and hence the rapid production of a black hole seed that could be $10^5 M_\odot$ or larger.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ letter

Breaking the Rules: Low Trait or State Self-Control Increases Social Norm Violations

Two pilot and six studies indicated that poor self-control causes people to violate social norms and rules that are effortful to follow. Lower trait self-control was associated with a greater willingness to take ethical risks and use curse words. Participants who completed an initial self-control task that reduced the capacity for self-control used more curse words and were more willing to take ethical risks than participants who completed a neutral task. Poor self-control was also associated with violating explicit rules given by the experimenter. Depleting self-control resources in a self-control exercise caused participants subsequently to talk when they had been instructed to remain silent. Low trait self-control and poor performance on a behavioral measure of self-control (the Stroop task) predicted poor compliance following experimental instructions over a 2-week span. Poor self-control thus undermines adherence to some social rules and regulations, therefore possibly contributing to a broad variety of social ills

Minding the Intergenerational Gap: The Impact of Age on Knowledge Hiding and Organizational Justice

Intergenerational workplaces contain multiple generations (Iweins et al., 2013) contributing to an organization’s climate with unique challenges as employees learn to work together despite generational barriers. With employees having increased career lengths and average lifespans, intergenerational workplaces are more prevalent, and the benefits of an age-diverse workplace cannot be understated (e.g., increased creativity, Backes-Gellner et al., 2011, increased decision-making capabilities Wegge et al., 2008). Knowledge management research has considered knowledge sharing within intergenerational teams, suggesting that age may be an important factor when considering employee’s knowledge sharing (Fasbender & Gerpott, 2021), but not explicitly knowledge hiding. Further, given there are many routes that age can have an influence on workplace processes, there have yet to be studies to consider the relationship between intergenerational contact and knowledge hiding. The current study investigates the moderating role of intergenerational contact between perceptions of organizational justice, age, and knowledge hiding. Additionally, we examine how knowledge hiding may subsequently impact exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect (EVLN). This study aims to address how issues arise in age-diverse organizations and how knowledge is effectively transferred to develop healthier age-diverse workplaces. This study considers the role of age, organizational justice, and intergenerational contact as predictors of knowledge hiding facets: playing dumb, evasive hiding, and rationalized hiding. Additionally, intergenerational contact, a subfactor of the workplace intergenerational climate scale (WICS) is expected to moderate the relationship between organizational justice and knowledge hiding. Further, the impact of knowledge hiding on EVLN is considered as differing knowledge hiding facets may impact these behaviors differently. For instance, evasive hiding may lead to increased neglect and rationalized hiding may lead to more loyalty. Data will be collected in a cross-sectional survey with a sample of 500 full-time workers obtained via CloudResearch’s Connect. Measures will include chronological age, WICS (King & Bryant, 2016), organizational justice (Colquitt, 2001), knowledge hiding (Connelly et al., 2012), and EVLN factors (Rusbult et al., 1982; Hirschman, 1970). Moderated mediation will be used. If the proposed model is accepted, the theoretical implications will situate more than chronological age within the knowledge management space by suggesting that age-diverse climates should be considered in knowledge management behaviors. Subsequently, the current study will identify facets of knowledge hiding that could warn employers about different workplace outcomes, like turnover. For practice, there may be ways to promote intergenerational contact within the workplace and alleviate knowledge hiding to provide recommendations for helping different aged workers

Effects of NMDA inhibition of rodent decision-making and reward-seeking behavior

In this study, we are investigating the relationship between NMDA receptor antagonists and decision-making. Rats choose between a Fixed-Delay (FD) lever that dispensed a sugar pellet in ten-second intervals and a Progressive-Delay (PD) lever that dispensed a sugar pellet at progressively increasing time intervals of one second. After training on the optimal decision-making task, rats were injected with MK-801 in a randomized sequence of doses of 0.06 mL/g, 0.1 mL/ 0.2mL/g with saline as the control. Analysis of behaviors in relation to optimal choices is ongoing in relation to the varying doses of MK-801

Foldit Standalone: a video game-derived protein structure manipulation interface using Rosetta

Summary: Foldit Standalone is an interactive graphical interface to the Rosetta molecular modeling package. In contrast to most command-line or batch interactions with Rosetta, Foldit Standalone is designed to allow easy, real-time, direct manipulation of protein structures, while also giving access to the extensive power of Rosetta computations. Derived from the user interface of the scientific discovery game Foldit (itself based on Rosetta), Foldit Standalone has added more advanced features and removed the competitive game elements. Foldit Standalone was built from the ground up with a custom rendering and event engine, configurable visualizations and interactions driven by Rosetta. Foldit Standalone contains, among other features: electron density and contact map visualizations, multiple sequence alignment tools for template-based modeling, rigid body transformation controls, RosettaScripts support and an embedded Lua interpreter

SToRytelling to Improve Disease outcomes in Gout (STRIDE-GO): A multicenter, randomized controlled trial in African American veterans with gout

BACKGROUND: Urate-lowering therapy (ULT) adherence is low in gout, and few, if any, effective, low-cost, interventions are available. Our objective was to assess if a culturally appropriate gout-storytelling intervention is superior to an attention control for improving gout outcomes in African-Americans (AAs). METHODS: In a 1-year, multicenter, randomized controlled trial, AA veterans with gout were randomized to gout-storytelling intervention vs. a stress reduction video (attention control group; 1:1 ratio). The primary outcome was ULT adherence measured with MEMSCap™, an electronic monitoring system that objectively measured ULT medication adherence. RESULTS: The 306 male AA veterans with gout who met the eligibility criteria were randomized to the gout-storytelling intervention (n = 152) or stress reduction video (n = 154); 261/306 (85%) completed the 1-year study. The mean age was 64 years, body mass index was 33 kg/m CONCLUSIONS: A culturally appropriate gout-storytelling intervention was not superior to attention control for improving gout outcomes in AAs with gout. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Registered at ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02741700

A Measure of Burnout in Current NCAA Student-Athletes

Introduction. The prevalence of athletes who specialize in sports has increased in recent years. Substantial literature on youth sports has linked early sport specialization to negative consequences, such as burnout and injury. However, empirical evidence comparing rates of burnout and specialization in NCAA athletes is limited. The purpose of this study was to survey current NCAA Division I student-athletes to compare levels of burnout to sex, year of NCAA eligibility, and age at the beginning of sport specialization. Methods. A self-reported survey was distributed to student-athletes at two NCAA Division I institutions, which included demographics, sport specialization history, injury history, and the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire. Results from the three measures of the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire (reduced sense of accomplishment, exhaustion, sport devaluation) were compared to sex, year of NCAA eligibility, age of beginning sport specialization, and injury history. Results. A total of 267 athletes (95 males and 172 females) completed the survey. Of those, 156 (58.4%) were in their first or second year of NCAA eligibility, and 111 (41.6%) were in their third, fourth, or fifth year. Of the total, 121 (46.4%) reported specializing before the age of 15, and 140 (53.6%) specialized at age 16 or older. Females reported significantly higher levels of exhaustion than males (Difference of means (M) = 0.43, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [0.20, 0.66], p < 0.01). Athletes in their third, fourth, or fifth year of eligibility reported significantly higher levels of sport devaluation (M = 0.27, 95% CI = [0.05, 0.48], p < 0.05) than athletes in their first or second year. Athletes who specialized before age 15 did not report significantly higher levels of burnout than athletes who specialized at age 16 or later. In total, 203 athletes (77.2%) reported experiencing any injury. Athletes who reported a history of experiencing any injury demonstrated significantly higher feelings of reduced sense of accomplishment than athletes with no injury history (Difference of means (M) = 0.24, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [0.03, 0.45], p < 0.05). Conclusions. Athletes were more likely to experience elevated levels of burnout if they reported female sex, older NCAA eligibility, or a past injury history. However, athletes were not more likely to experience increased burnout based on age of beginning specialization. The results demonstrated a need to address burnout in athletes following injury and to be aware that females and older athletes are more prone to burnout

Mergers of Stellar-Mass Black Holes in Nuclear Star Clusters

Mergers between stellar-mass black holes will be key sources of gravitational radiation for ground-based detectors. However, the rates of these events are highly uncertain, given that such systems are invisible. One formation scenario involves mergers in field binaries, where our lack of complete understanding of common envelopes and the distribution of supernova kicks has led to rate estimates that range over a factor of several hundred. A different, and highly promising, channel involves multiple encounters of binaries in globular clusters or young star clusters. However, we currently lack solid evidence for black holes in almost all such clusters, and their low escape speeds raise the possibility that most are ejected because of supernova recoil. Here we propose that a robust environment for mergers could be the nuclear star clusters found in the centers of small galaxies. These clusters have millions of stars, black hole relaxation times well under a Hubble time, and escape speeds that are several times those of globulars, hence they retain most of their black holes. We present simulations of the three-body dynamics of black holes in this environment and estimate that, if most nuclear star clusters do not have supermassive black holes that interfere with the mergers, at least several tens of events per year will be detectable with Advanced LIGO.Comment: 15 pages including one figure, submitted to The Astrophysical Journa