Same Titles, Different Formats: Does Print or Electronic Get More Use?

This article examines the use of both print and electronic monographs at George Fox University libraries over a period of thirty-three months for 8,500 titles that were held in both formats. Results indicate that print is more likely to be used than electronic. The implications of the findings, as well as related factors determining future decision making relative to format, are discussed

Book review: governmentality and counter-hegemony in Bangladesh by S.M. Shamsul Alam

In Governmentality and Counter-Hegemony in Bangladesh, S.M. Shamsul Alam seeks to conjoin Michel Foucault’s theorisations of governmentality with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of counter-hegemony in order to account for changes in forms of governance in the case of Bangladesh. Although the book’s structure is occasionally repetitive and disjointed, Alex Johnson argues that Alam offers a valuable reappraisal of the concept of governmentality that will be of use to students and academics working in the field of political theory

A new sequential covering strategy for inducing classification rules with ant colony algorithms

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have been successfully applied to discover a list of classification rules. In general, these algorithms follow a sequential covering strategy, where a single rule is discovered at each iteration of the algorithm in order to build a list of rules. The sequential covering strategy has the drawback of not coping with the problem of rule interaction, i.e., the outcome of a rule affects the rules that can be discovered subsequently since the search space is modified due to the removal of examples covered by previous rules. This paper proposes a new sequential covering strategy for ACO classification algorithms to mitigate the problem of rule interaction, where the order of the rules is implicitly encoded as pheromone values and the search is guided by the quality of a candidate list of rules. Our experiments using 18 publicly available data sets show that the predictive accuracy obtained by a new ACO classification algorithm implementing the proposed sequential covering strategy is statistically significantly higher than the predictive accuracy of state-of-the-art rule induction classification algorithms

Freeze-thaw performance of pavement foundation materials

Freezing and thawing processes damage pavement foundation systems; increase pavement and vehicle maintenance costs; reduce traveler comfort and safety; decrease fuel economy; and decrease pavement life spans. Current pavement design methods provide limited guidance for characterizing frost-susceptible materials. A laboratory frost-heave and thaw-weakening test could be used to differentiate frost-susceptible materials from non-frost-susceptible materials to reduce the effects of frost action. The goal of this research was to provide guidance for selecting pavement foundation materials based on their freeze-thaw durability. The objectives of this study were to use ASTM D5918 Standard Test Methods for Frost Heave and Thaw Weakening Susceptibility of Soils to determine the relative frost-susceptibility of various soil types; study the effects of stabilizers on reducing frost-susceptibility; and determine seasonal changes of in situ pavement support conditions. The important outcomes of this research are that it is difficult to predict frost-heave susceptibility from USCS classifications; the coefficients of variation for ASTM D5918 test results were similar to published results; when stabilizing loess with cement, increased cement content decreased the range of initial moisture contents that result in maximum compressive strength; and compared to unstabilized loess, cement-stabilized loess was found to be non-frost-susceptible, but fly ash-stabilized loess showed only slight improvement. This research suggests that using a test such as ASTM D5918 to compare the relative frost-susceptibility of pavement foundation materials in the design phase may reduce the effects of frost action

Substance Abuse Education in Master\u27s of Social Work Programs: A Content Analysis

Prior research suggests that inadequate substance abuse education in social work programs contributes to misdiagnosis, bias, and produces students who are unprepared to work with substance abuse. This study assessed for the presence of substance abuse education in Minnesota MSW programs’ core curriculum. Using 19 educational objectives based on Minnesota statute for Alcohol and Drug Counseling licensure, this study sought to determine if current graduates are adequately prepared to work with substance abusing and dependent people and their families. Five of six MSW programs were assessed. This study found that only 4 of 19 objectives were met by all schools, while 7 of 19 objectives did not appear in any of the schools syllabi. The majority of schools do not appear to be teaching assessment, crisis intervention, family systems dynamics, cultural implications, or even a basic overview related to substance abuse. Implications for social work education include mandatory integration of these 5 objectives into MSW programs. These objectives are exclusive to substance abuse practice and are not easily applied without specific education. Teaching these objectives would offer a baseline understanding of the complex nature of substance abuse and benefit all Master’s level social workers regardless of specialty

Substance Abuse Education in Master\u27s of Social Work Programs: A Content Analysis

Prior research suggests that inadequate substance abuse education in social work programs contributes to misdiagnosis, bias, and produces students who are unprepared to work with substance abuse. This study assessed for the presence of substance abuse education in Minnesota MSW programs’ core curriculum. Using 19 educational objectives based on Minnesota statute for Alcohol and Drug Counseling licensure, this study sought to determine if current graduates are adequately prepared to work with substance abusing and dependent people and their families. Five of six MSW programs were assessed. This study found that only 4 of 19 objectives were met by all schools, while 7 of 19 objectives did not appear in any of the schools syllabi. The majority of schools do not appear to be teaching assessment, crisis intervention, family systems dynamics, cultural implications, or even a basic overview related to substance abuse. Implications for social work education include mandatory integration of these 5 objectives into MSW programs. These objectives are exclusive to substance abuse practice and are not easily applied without specific education. Teaching these objectives would offer a baseline understanding of the complex nature of substance abuse and benefit all Master’s level social workers regardless of specialty

Giant Leaps and Minimal Branes in Multi-Dimensional Flux Landscapes

There is a standard story about decay in multi-dimensional flux landscapes: that from any state, the fastest decay is to take a small step, discharging one flux unit at a time; that fluxes with the same coupling constant are interchangeable; and that states with N units of a given flux have the same decay rate as those with -N. We show that this standard story is false. The fastest decay is a giant leap that discharges many different fluxes in unison; this decay is mediated by a 'minimal' brane that wraps the internal manifold and exhibits behavior not visible in the effective theory. We discuss the implications for the cosmological constant.Comment: Minor updates to agree with published version. 9 pages, 4 figure

Characterization of Protein-Protein Interactions for Therapeutic Drug Design Utilizing Mass Spectrometry

The number of transferrin based therapeutics progressing to clinical trials remains disappointingly small despite promising capabilities of transporting therapeutic payloads to cancer cells and across the blood brain barrier. This meager success record is largely due to the complexity and heterogeneity of all protein conjugation products that generates difficulties for their analytical characterization. Discussed in this work, transferrin is conjugated to lysozyme as a model therapeutic to deliver this bacteriostatic protein to target central nervous system infections. In this work ESI- and MALDI-MS were used to characterize the modification sites at lysine residues in hopes of characterizing heterogeneity within the conjugate. Identification and quantization of modification sites using MS on tryptic digested samples proved difficult with poor signal to noise ratios and missing peptide fragments. The use of an 18O labeling method that exchanges both C-terminal oxygen atoms with 18O provided more reliable results, but still proved difficult to observe all needed peptide fragments. MALDI-MS allowed for verification of ESI-MS results, but was found unhelpful with full characterization due to abundant overlapping of isotopic labeled peaks. Hoping to create an ideal 1:1 binding ratio between the two proteins, a site-specific modification method using kinetically controlled conditions was used and was confirmed that the method, although capable of producing 1:1 conjugated species, actually created different isomers with separate binding frequencies at each lysine. Online-IEC helped with the identification of isomers and started the initial work of correlating modification sites with bioactivity of the proteins. It was determined that lysozyme has a high chance of being modified at lysine 33 and 116, with a possibility of also being highly modified at lysine 97. More work is needed to complete the characterization, especially with transferrin, but the experimental approaches developed in this work prove to be promising. This work aims at delivering an optimized framework for analytical characterization of protein and antibody conjugates to guide the development of future biopharmaceuticals