Sorption and transport of veterinary antibiotics in agroforestry buffer, grass buffer, and cropland soils

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on June 4, 2012).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisors: Drs. Keith W. Goyne and Stephen H. AndersonVita.Ph. D. University of Missouri--Columbia 2011."December 2011"Understanding sorption and transport of veterinary antibiotics (VAs) is important for assessing the risk of VAs reaching water resources. Vegetative buffer strips (VBS) may be a useful tool for mitigating veterinary antibiotic transport from agricultural lands. Sorption experiment results showed that oxytetracycline (OTC) was strongly adsorbed and not readily extractable, while sulfadimethoxine (SDT) and sulfamethazine (SMZ) were highly mobile in soil. For all the antibiotics studied, VBS soils had higher sorption capacity than cropland soils. Linear regression analyses indicate that clay content and pH were the most important soil properties controlling OTC and SDT adsorption, respectively. For SMZ, organic carbon content, pH, initial SMZ concentration, and clay content were the most important factors controlling sorption. Dissolved organic matter had a slight negative effect on SMZ sorption. Transport experiments of SMZ were conducted in glass columns repacked with agroforestry and cropland soils. Computer modeling using HYDRUS-1D software indicated that a three-site model containing two reversible sites and one irreversible site coupled with the Freundlich sorption component best describes SMZ transport through the columns. Data from equilibrium sorption experiments and column transport experiments suggest that the AGF soil has a larger capacity to retain SMZ than the cropland soil. Overall, this research facilitates our understanding of VA sorption and transport in the environment and supports the use of vegetative buffers to mitigate VA loss from agroecosystems.Includes bibliographical reference

HoneyBug: Personalized Cyber Deception for Web Applications

Cyber deception is used to reverse cyber warfare asymmetry by diverting adversaries to false targets in order to avoid their attacks, consume their resources, and potentially learn new attack tactics. In practice, effective cyber deception systems must be both attractive, to offer temptation for engagement, and believable, to convince unknown attackers to stay on the course. However, developing such a system is a highly challenging task because attackers have different expectations, expertise levels, and objectives. This makes a deception system with a static configuration only suitable for a specific type of attackers. In order to attract diverse types of attackers and prolong their engagement, we need to dynamically characterize every individual attacker\u27s interactions with the deception system to learn her sophistication level and objectives and personalize the deception system to match with her profile and interest. In this paper, we present an adaptive deception system, called HoneyBug, that dynamically creates a personalized deception plan for web applications to match the attacker\u27s expectation, which is learned by analyzing her behavior over time. Each HoneyBug plan exhibits fake vulnerabilities specifically selected based on the learned attacker\u27s profile. Through evaluation, we show that HoneyBug characterization model can accurately characterize the attacker profile after observing only a few interactions and adapt its cyber deception plan accordingly. The HoneyBug characterization is built on top of a novel and generic evidential reasoning framework for attacker profiling, which is one of the focal contributions of this work

Secure Software Engineering Education: Knowledge Area, Curriculum and Resources

This paper reviews current efforts and resources in secure software engineering education, with the goal of providing guidance for educators to make use of these resources in developing secure software engineering curriculum. These resources include Common Body of Knowledge, reference curriculum, sample curriculum materials, hands-on exercises, and resources developed by industry and open source community. The relationship among the Common Body of Knowledge proposed by the Department of Homeland Security, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and ACM/IEEE are discussed. The recent practices on secure software engineering education, including secure software engineering related programs, courses, and course modules are reviewed. The course modules are categorized into four categories to facilitate the adoption of these course modules. Available hands-on exercises developed for teaching software security are described and mapped to the taxonomy of coding errors. The rich resources including various secure software development processes, methods and tools developed by industry and open source community are surveyed. A road map is provided to organize these resources and guide educators in adopting these resources and integrating them into their courses

Veterinary antibiotic sorption to agroforestry buffer, grass buffer and cropland soils

Paper presented at the 11th North American Agroforesty Conference, which was held May 31-June 3, 2009 in Columbia, Missouri.In Gold, M.A. and M.M. Hall, eds. Agroforestry Comes of Age: Putting Science into Practice. Proceedings, 11th North American Agroforestry Conference, Columbia, Mo., May 31-June 3, 2009.Veterinary antibiotics are used to treat infectious animal diseases and enhance animal growth. In Missouri, the increased growth of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and the need to dispose of manure generated by CAFOS may be problematic due to co-application of antibiotics during land application of manure. Surface runoff events from claypan or claypan-like soils are relatively frequent; thus, there is a need to develop and evaluate the use of vegetative buffer strips (VBS) as management tools to reduce antibiotic transport to surface water resources. The objectives of this study were to (1) investigate oxytetracycline (OTC) and sulfadimethoxine (SDT) sorption to agroforestry (tree/grass) buffer, grass buffer, and cropland soils, (2) evaluate differences in antibiotic sorption between soils collected from different vegetative species, and (3) elucidate relationships between soil properties and antibiotic sorption. Sorption/desorption isotherms generated using batch techniques were well-fitted by the Freundlich isotherm model (r2 [greater than] 0.80). Oxytetracycline was strongly adsorbed by all soils, and the antibiotic was not readily desorbed; hysteresis was observed between all adsorption and desorption isotherms. Solid-solution distribution coefficients (Kd) values of OTC are an order of magnitude greater than those of SDT. Statistical analyses indicate that OTC Kd values are significantly greater for VBS soils relative to cropland soil, and STD Kd values are significantly greater for agroforestry soils as compared to other soils studied. Regression analyses correlating antibiotic sorption to soil properties are in progress. Results indicate that agroforestry and grass buffers may effectively mitigate antibiotic loss from agroecosystems due to enhanced antibiotic sorption properties.Bei Chu (1), Keith Goyne (1), Stephen H. Anderson (1), Ranjith P. Udawatta (2) and Chung-Ho Lin (2) ; 1. Department of Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Missouri, 302 ABNR Building, Columbia, MO 65211. 2. Center for Agroforestry, University of Missouri, 203 ABNR, Columbia, MO 65211.Includes bibliographical references

Rare Gingival Metastasis by Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) uncommonly metastasizes to the gingiva, which always means a poor outcome. We reported a rare HCC case with multiple metastases to gingiva, lungs, and brain. A 60-year-old man was initially diagnosed as HCC with metastases to double lungs. He was subjected to a transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) (5-fluorouracil, 750 mg) and two cycles of intravenous chemotherapy (gemcitabine 1.8 g at days 1 and 8, oxaliplatin 200 mg at day 2, every 4 weeks). However, the volume of liver tumor still increased. A bean-size gingival nodule growing with occasional bleeding was also found. TACE (5-fluorouracil 750 mg, perarubicin 40 mg, cisplatin 20 mg) was performed again and an oral sorafenib therapy (400 mg, twice per day) was adopted. The disease maintained relatively stable for about 6 months until a second obvious progress. The gingival nodule was then palliatively excised and identified as a poorly differentiated metastatic HCC by histopathological examination. Best supportive treatments were made since the performance score was too bad. Finally, cerebral metastases occurred and the patient died of systemic failure. Upon review of previous reports, we discussed risk factors, clinical and pathological characteristics, treatments, and prognosis of gingival metastasis by HCC

Faculty Workshops for Teaching Information Assurance through Hands-On Exercises and Case Studies

Though many Information Assurance (IA) educators agree that hands-on exercises and case studies improve student learning, hands-on exercises and case studies are not widely adopted due to the time needed to develop them and integrate them into curriculum. Under the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarship for Service program, we organized two faculty development workshops to disseminate effective hands-on exercises and case studies developed through multiple previous and ongoing grants. To develop faculty expertise in IA, the workshop covered a wide range of IA topics. This paper describes the hands-on exercises and case studies we disseminated through the workshops and reports our experiences of holding the faculty summer workshops. The evaluation results show that workshop participants demonstrated high levels of satisfaction with knowledge and skills gained in both the 2012 and 2013 workshops. Workshop participants also reported use of hands-on lab and case study materials in our follow-up survey and interviews. The workshops provided a valuable opportunity for IA educators to communicate and form collaborations in teaching and research in IA

Genome-wide identification, classification and analysis of heat shock transcription factor family in maize

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Heat shock response in eukaryotes is transcriptionally regulated by conserved heat shock transcription factors (Hsfs). Hsf genes are represented by a large multigene family in plants and investigation of the Hsf gene family will serve to elucidate the mechanisms by which plants respond to stress. In recent years, reports of genome-wide structural and evolutionary analysis of the entire Hsf gene family have been generated in two model plant systems, <it>Arabidopsis </it>and rice. Maize, an important cereal crop, has represented a model plant for genetics and evolutionary research. Although some Hsf genes have been characterized in maize, analysis of the entire Hsf gene family were not completed following Maize (B73) Genome Sequencing Project.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A genome-wide analysis was carried out in the present study to identify all Hsfs maize genes. Due to the availability of complete maize genome sequences, 25 nonredundant Hsf genes, named <it>ZmHsfs </it>were identified. Chromosomal location, protein domain and motif organization of ZmHsfs were analyzed in maize genome. The phylogenetic relationships, gene duplications and expression profiles of <it>ZmHsf </it>genes were also presented in this study. Twenty-five ZmHsfs were classified into three major classes (class A, B, and C) according to their structural characteristics and phylogenetic comparisons, and class A was further subdivided into 10 subclasses. Moreover, phylogenetic analysis indicated that the orthologs from the three species (maize, <it>Arabidopsis </it>and rice) were distributed in all three classes, it also revealed diverse Hsf gene family expression patterns in classes and subclasses. Chromosomal/segmental duplications played a key role in Hsf gene family expansion in maize by investigation of gene duplication events. Furthermore, the transcripts of 25 <it>ZmHsf </it>genes were detected in the leaves by heat shock using quantitative real-time PCR. The result demonstrated that <it>ZmHsf </it>genes exhibit different expression levels in heat stress treatment.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Overall, data obtained from our investigation contributes to a better understanding of the complexity of the maize Hsf gene family and provides the first step towards directing future experimentation designed to perform systematic analysis of the functions of the Hsf gene family.</p

The Online Data Quality Monitoring System at BESIII

The online Data Quality Monitoring (DQM) plays an important role in the data taking process of HEP experiments. BESIII DQM samples data from online data flow, reconstructs them with offline reconstruction software, and automatically analyzes the reconstructed data with user-defined algorithms. The DQM software is a scalable distributed system. The monitored results are gathered and displayed in various formats, which provides the shifter with current run information that can be used to find problems early. This paper gives an overview of DQM system at BESIII.Comment: Already submit to Chinese Physics