Extractable and Non-Extractable Polyphenols from Apples: Potential Anti-inflammatory Agents

With diet being such a huge factor in the development of diseases, emerging research has supported that apple consumption is a promising candidate for disease prevention due to the high phenolic content it possesses. These polyphenols can be found in two forms: extractable polyphenols (EP) and non-extractable polyphenols (NEP). Polyphenols have been shown to have strong anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties, but up until this point, most researchers focus on EP fractions, while NEP are neglected. After the EP extraction using acetone and acetic acid (99:1) from the Apple Boost powder, three additional extraction methods were conducted on the remaining powder residue to extract the NEP. These extractions put the residue in three different environments for hydrolysis to compare their extraction abilities: enzyme, alkaline, and acid. After analyzing the EP and NEP total phenolic content (TPC) levels, oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) assay was conducted to measure anti-oxidation capacity of each extraction, and in vitro anti-inflammatory assay was performed to evaluate the anti-inflammation capacity of each extraction where inflammation was induced by LPS. The results showed that the NEP obtained from acid hydrolysis had the highest readings in both the TPC and ORAC assay, but did not show any anti-inflammatory effects in vitro. The EP extraction had the second highest readings in the TPC, ORAC and anti-inflammatory assays. The NEP enzyme extraction had the second lowest TPC and ORAC assay performance, but highest performance in the anti-inflammatory assay. The NEP alkaline extraction had the lowest TPC and performed poorly in both the anti-inflammatory assay and ORAC assay

The Creation of a Virginia Coastal Resilience Development Authority: An Inventory of State Coastal Resilience Authorities and Funding Mechanisms to Help Guide Virginia

In June 2018, Governor Ralph Northam signed legislation creating a cabinet-level position, the Special Assistant to the Governor for Coastal Adaptation and Protection, to lead efforts in addressing coastal resilience and flooding mitigation in Virginia. The following November, Governor Northam signed Executive Order No. 24, which directed the state to increase statewide resilience to natural hazards and extreme weather. This Executive Order directed Virginia to develop a Coastal Resilience Master Plan (CRMP). In order to implement the projects proposed in the CRMP, the Commonwealth will need funding. This paper provides an inventory of various states’ programs for funding coastal resilience efforts and sets forth recommendations for Virginia. Before analyzing other states’ funding mechanisms, it would be helpful to identify the most popular sources for funding. Some of these options include federal grants, funding for United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) resilience projects, utility taxes, special taxing districts, municipal bonds, environmental impact bonds, catastrophe bonds, credit trading markets, private foundation grants, private investments, and tax exemptions. This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction

Analysis and Optimization for Pipelined Asynchronous Systems

Most microelectronic chips used today--in systems ranging from cell phones to desktop computers to supercomputers--operate in basically the same way: they synchronize the operation of their millions of internal components using a clock that is distributed globally. This global clocking is becoming a critical design challenge in the quest for building chips that offer increasingly greater functionality, higher speed, and better energy efficiency. As an alternative, asynchronous or clockless design obviates the need for global synchronization; instead, components operate concurrently and synchronize locally only when necessary. This dissertation focuses on one class of asynchronous circuits: application specific stream processing systems (i.e. those that take in a stream of data items and produce a stream of processed results.) High-speed stream processors are a natural match for many high-end applications, including 3D graphics rendering, image and video processing, digital filters and DSPs, cryptography, and networking processors. This dissertation aims to make the design, analysis, optimization, and testing of circuits in the chosen domain both fast and efficient. Although much of the groundwork has already been laid by years of past work, my work identifies and addresses four critical missing pieces: i) fast performance analysis for estimating the throughput of a fine-grained pipelined system; ii) automated and versatile design space exploration; iii) a full suite of circuit level modules that connect together to implement a wide variety of system behaviors; and iv) testing and design for testability techniques that identify and target the types of errors found only in high-speed pipelined asynchronous systems. I demonstrate these techniques on a number of examples, ranging from simple applications that allow for easy comparison to hand-designed alternatives to more complex systems, such as a JPEG encoder. I also demonstrate these techniques through the design and test of a fully asynchronous GCD demonstration chip

Effect of Holland personality type similarity and family ideology on marital satisfaction among dual-career spouses

The purpose of this study was to determine if Holland vocational personality type similarity and/or traditional/ egalitarian family ideology affected marital satisfaction among dual-career spouses. The population for this study was Oregon State University graduate students and faculty, married to spouses who had career aspirations outside the home. Holland personality type (HPT) of respondents was determined by choice of graduate school major. The degree of similarity between the HPTs of the spouses was determined using the Holland hexagon model. Family ideology was assessed using the Traditional Family Ideology scale. Marital satisfaction was assessed using the Locke Marital Adjustment Test. A 2x3 ANOVA was performed with marital satisfaction as the dependent variable. All tests were performed with α= . 05 and a statistical power level of .80. Tukey's multiple comparisons test was used to determine which cell means were different. No statistical interaction was found. Chi-square was used to determine if mate selection was affected by HPT similarity. This study found no difference in marital satisfaction (MS} between spouses married to mates of identical HPT as themselves, compared to spouses married to mates having dissimilar HPTs. However, those spouses married to mates having an intermediate level of HPT similarity as themselves reported lower levels of marital satisfaction than either the identical HPT or dissimilar HPT group. The finding of low marital satisfaction among these couples was not consistent with expectations based upon the Holland theory. This finding may have been in part a function of the Artistic/Investigative type combination which predominated in this group, or a function for respondent's level of self-esteem. Family ideology did not affect MS in this study. While the number of marriages among spouses sharing identical HPTs did not exceed chance expectation, this finding may have been biased due to the predominantly Investigative environment of the University

The Malthusian Paradox: performance in an alternate reality game

The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne played by 300 participants over three months. We explore the design of the game, which cast players as agents of a radical organisation attempting to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping and a sinister biotech corporation, and highlight how it redefined performative frames by blurring conventional performer and spectator roles in sometimes discomforting ways. Players participated in the game via a broad spectrum of interaction channels, including performative group spectacles and 1-to-1 engagements with game characters in public settings, making use of low- and high-tech physical and online artefacts including bespoke and third party websites. Players and game characters communicated via telephony and social media in both a designed and an ad-hoc manner. We reflect on the production and orchestration of the game, including the dynamic nature of the strong episodic narrative driven by professionally produced short films that attempted to respond to the actions of players; and the difficulty of designing for engagement across hybrid and temporally expansive performance space. We suggest that an ARG whose boundaries are necessarily unclear affords rich and emergent, but potentially unsanctioned and uncontrolled, opportunities for interactive performance, which raises significant challenges for design

Picture this:A review of research relating to narrative processing by moving image versus language

Reading fiction for pleasure is robustly correlated with improved cognitive attainment and other benefits. It is also in decline among young people in developed nations, in part because of competition from moving image fiction. We review existing research on the differences between reading or hearing verbal fiction and watching moving image fiction, as well as looking more broadly at research on image or text interactions and visual versus verbal processing. We conclude that verbal narrative generates more diverse responses than moving image narrative. We note that reading and viewing narrative are different tasks, with different cognitive loads. Viewing moving image narrative mostly involves visual processing with some working memory engagement, whereas reading narrative involves verbal processing, visual imagery, and personal memory (Xu et al., 2005). Attempts to compare the two by creating equivalent stimuli and task demands face a number of challenges. We discuss the difficulties of such comparative approaches. We then investigate the possibility of identifying lower level processing mechanisms that might distinguish cognition of the two media and propose internal scene construction and working memory as foci for future research. Although many of the sources we draw on concentrate on English-speaking participants in European or North American settings, we also cover material relating to speakers of Dutch, German, Hebrew, and Japanese in their respective countries, and studies of a remote Turkish mountain community

The Creation of a Virginia Coastal Resilience Development Authority: An Inventory of State Coastal Resilience Authorities and Funding Mechanisms to Help Guide Virginia

In June 2018, Governor Ralph Northam signed legislation creating a cabinet-level position, the Special Assistant to the Governor for Coastal Adaptation and Protection, to lead efforts in addressing coastal resilience and flooding mitigation in Virginia. The following November, Governor Northam signed Executive Order No. 24, which directed the state to increase statewide resilience to natural hazards and extreme weather. This Executive Order directed Virginia to develop a Coastal Resilience Master Plan (CRMP). In order to implement the projects proposed in the CRMP, the Commonwealth will need funding. This paper provides an inventory of various states’ programs for funding coastal resilience efforts and sets forth recommendations for Virginia. Before analyzing other states’ funding mechanisms, it would be helpful to identify the most popular sources for funding. Some of these options include federal grants, funding for United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) resilience projects, utility taxes, special taxing districts, municipal bonds, environmental impact bonds, catastrophe bonds, credit trading markets, private foundation grants, private investments, and tax exemptions. This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction

Bottleneck analysis and alleviation in pipelined systems: A fast hierarchical approach

Abstract—Fast bottleneck detection and elimination is an important component of any design flow that aims at producing high-throughput systems. Bottlenecks can be difficult to find and correct, because their causes are diverse and often subtle. In this paper, we build on our recent method for performance analysis to develop a method for bottleneck identification and alleviation for pipelined asynchronous systems. More specifically, this paper makes two contributions. First, we introduce a method that, given a throughput goal, identifies which parts of the pipelined system constrain its throughput. Each such bottleneck is categorized based on the type of structural transformation that could potentially alleviate it: increase degree of pipelining (stage splitting, stage duplication, and loop unrolling); decrease forward latency (stage merging and parallelization); and perform slack matching. The second contribution is a method that guides the user to systematically apply these modifications to alleviate the bottlenecks and reach a target throughput goal. We have validated the bottleneck analysis method on several examples and were able to attain the desired throughput goal in each case through iterative application of our bottleneck alleviation method. Runtimes were negligible in all cases (less than 50 ms). I