The antisaccade task: Visual distractors elicit a location-independent planning \u27cost\u27

Prosaccades are rapid eye movements with direct stimulus and response relations and are designed to bring the fovea onto a target or area of interest. In contrast, antisaccades require the inhibition of a prosaccade and the evocation of a saccade to a target’s mirror-symmetrical location. Previous work has shown that a remote (i.e., midline, contralateral) – but not proximal (i.e., ipsilateral) – task-irrelevant distractor relative to a visual target delays prosaccade reaction times (RT) (i.e., remote distractor effect: RDE). To my knowledge, however, no work has examined whether antisaccade RTs are similarly influenced by a RDE. Accordingly, I sought to determine whether planning costs for antisaccades are similarly dependent on the location-specific presentation of a distractor. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate increased antisaccade RTs independent of the spatial location of a distractor. Based on this result, I concluded that distractor-related antisaccade costs reflect the top-down evocation of explicit response-selection rules

Rhode Island Election Tickets: A Survey

Rhode Island was the first English colony in America to issue printed election ballots, with the first issued in the mid-1740s. This survey of Rhode Island election tickets, while not exhaustive, is representative of the use of tickets in elections spanning a period of over 150 years and documents state and local politics, political factions and election results from the Ward-Hopkins controversy of the colonial period to political factions during the War of 1812, the Anti-Masonic period of the 1830s, the Law and Order coalition of the 1840s following events of the Dorr Rebellion, the temperance movement of the 1850s, the pro-Union tickets of the Civil War, and Greenback party and Prohibitory factions of the 1870s and 1880s. Statewide elections for general officers, United States congressional representatives, presidential electors, special purpose elections as well as local elections for city, town and district offices are also examined. The scope of this study includes a survey of tickets found in the collections of the University of Rhode Island Library Special Collections, Rhode Island State Archives, Warwick Historical Society as well as private collections of Henry A.L. Brown, Russell DeSimone, and Daniel Schofield. This document was last revised in 2015. The previous version (2007) can be found below as a supplemental file

Voting and the Spirit of Democracy

This book is published in conjunction with Voting and the Spirit of Democracy, an exhibition held at the University Library, University of Rhode Island 2004

In vitro and in vivo models to assess kidney toxicity of environmental carcinogens

The etiology of sporadic kidney cancer in humans is unclear. However, it is known that VHL tumor suppressor gene mutations are found in the majority of human renal tumors, even in the earliest stages, and play an important role in kidney cancer development. Evidence suggests that VHL may be a target for environmental carcinogens such as trichloroethylene (TCE), which is associated with a specific point mutation in the VHL gene. Co-exposures to elevated levels of TCE and inorganic arsenic through groundwater and dietary sources are frequently found in human populations and are thought to cause multiple organ toxicities. We hypothesize that there is a mechanistic link between environmental co-exposures to TCE- and arsenic-induced renal toxicity that can be elucidated using genetically engineered model systems. Here we have generated both an in vitro model system of the TCE-associated VHL mutation in embryonic stem cells, as well as a unique F3 mouse population derived from the cross between FVB/N-Abcb1a/1b-/-, a multi-drug resistant transporter knockout, and CAST/EiJ, a wild-derived strain from a different subspecies of Mus musculus. We have employed these systems to elucidate the genetic and environmental components critical for the development of renal cell carcinoma due to environmental co-exposures to TCE and arsenic

Methods for Purifying Enzymes for Mycoremediation

A process for purifying laccase from an ectomycorrhizal fruiting body is disclosed. The process includes steps of homogenization, sonication, centrifugation, filtration, affinity chromatography, ion exchange chromatography, and gel filtration. Purified laccase can also be separated into isomers

Domain structure of bulk ferromagnetic crystals in applied fields near saturation

We investigate the ground state of a uniaxial ferromagnetic plate with perpendicular easy axis and subject to an applied magnetic field normal to the plate. Our interest is the asymptotic behavior of the energy in macroscopically large samples near the saturation field. We establish the scaling of the critical value of the applied field strength below saturation at which the ground state changes from the uniform to a branched domain magnetization pattern and the leading order scaling behavior of the minimal energy. Furthermore, we derive a reduced sharp-interface energy giving the precise asymptotic behavior of the minimal energy in macroscopically large plates under a physically reasonable assumption of small deviations of the magnetization from the easy axis away from domain walls. On the basis of the reduced energy, and by a formal asymptotic analysis near the transition, we derive the precise asymptotic values of the critical field strength at which non-trivial minimizers (either local or global) emerge. The non-trivial minimal energy scaling is achieved by magnetization patterns consisting of long slender needle-like domains of magnetization opposing the applied fieldComment: 38 pages, 7 figures, submitted to J. Nonlin. Sci

Blueprinting Photothermal Shape-Morphing of Liquid Crystal Elastomers

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are an attractive platform for dynamic shape‐morphing due to their ability to rapidly undergo large deformations. While recent work has focused on patterning the director orientation field to achieve desired target shapes, this strategy cannot be generalized to material systems where high‐resolution surface alignment is impractical. Instead of programming the local orientation of anisotropic deformation, an alternative strategy for prescribed shape‐morphing by programming the magnitude of stretch ratio in a thin LCE sheet with constant director orientation is developed here. By spatially patterning the concentration of gold nanoparticles, uniform illumination leads to gradients in photothermal heat generation and therefore spatially nonuniform deformation profiles that drive out‐of‐plane buckling of planar films into predictable 3D shapes. Experimentally realized shapes are shown to agree closely with both finite element simulations and geometric predictions for systems with unidirectional variation in deformation magnitude. Finally, the possibility to achieve complex oscillatory motion driven by uniform illumination of a free‐standing patterned sheet is demonstrated