Perfect (a poem)

This sonnet-length, unrhymed syllabic poem speaks of the way the concept of perfection engages the imagination of mathematicians, an experience it compares to the mysterious, complex attraction we may feel toward a lover

Zeno of Elea: A Dichotomy

This two-part poem interprets Zeno\u27s paradoxes as dimensions of a paradoxical view of reality

Biochemical investigation of the ubiquitin carboxyl-terminal hydrolase family

The proteasome is the machinery in eukaryotic cells that degrades protein and recycles the amino acids. Protein degradation is a highly regulated process which starts by the attachment of chains of ubiquitin, which serves as a tag that marks a protein for degradation. This function involves the work of several proteins at the proteasome that work either as ubiquitin chaperones, ubiquitin binders or cleave ubiquitin from the protein that is to be degraded. As this is a highly regulated process, various irregularities can have deleterious effects including the onset of disease, including cardiovascular, cancer, and neurological. ^ The focus of this dissertation is to study how residues located within and outside the active site of Ubiquitin Carboxyl Terminal Hydrolase (UCH) deubiquinating enzymes (DUBS) help regulate these enzymes interaction with the ubiquitin. I will provide evidence that the putative oxyanion glutamine does function contribute to stabilization of the oxyanion intermediate. Secondly, I will show that evidence that glutamine may also serve another function within the active site by providing a CHO hydrogen bond that was previously thought not to exist within the active sites of cysteine proteases. Lastly, I will show that a conserved tryptophan in UCH37 has an effect on its catalytic viability

The Relationship among Ankle Function, Functional Capacity, and Body Composition to Balance in Geriatric Populations

The primary purpose of this research study was to identify significant relationships among measures of ankle strength, ankle range of motion, body composition, and functional capacity to balance ability in geriatric populations which may potentially assist in identifying older individuals with increased risk of falling. A battery of five test (ankle strength assessments, ankle range of motion , DXA, functional fitness, and balance) were administered to 20 participants (6 males, 14 females, mean age 69.78 ± 3.98) that had indicated to be at least 65 years of age or older and no history of falls within the previous 12 months. Results demonstrated that no significant statistical relationships exist between functional components (R2 = .240, Part2 = .11, p = .358), relative strength (R2 = .240, Part2 = .09, p = .358), range of motion (R2 = .240, Part2 = .00, p = .358) and body composition (R2 = .240, Part2 = .07, p = .358) as each relates to balance. Additionally, the data failed to demonstrate any significant relationship of relative ankle strength (R2 = .19, Part2 = .08, p = .221) and ankle range of motion (R2 = .10, Part2 = .08, p = .221) as compared to functional capacity. Although the data failed to demonstrate statistical significance or strong correlations, the individual components effect on balance may be more appropriately observed when combined with more complex indicators of fall risk such as gait analysis or biomechanical measures in dynamic balance conditions

Signaling local non-credibility in an automatic segmentation pipeline

The advancing technology for automatic segmentation of medical images should be accompanied by techniques to inform the user of the local credibility of results. To the extent that this technology produces clinically acceptable segmentations for a significant fraction of cases, there is a risk that the clinician will assume every result is acceptable. In the less frequent case where segmentation fails, we are concerned that unless the user is alerted by the computer, she would still put the result to clinical use. By alerting the user to the location of a likely segmentation failure, we allow her to apply limited validation and editing resources where they are most needed. We propose an automated method to signal suspected non-credible regions of the segmentation, triggered by statistical outliers of the local image match function. We apply this test to m-rep segmentations of the bladder and prostate in CT images using a local image match computed by PCA on regional intensity quantile functions. We validate these results by correlating the non-credible regions with regions that have surface distance greater than 5.5mm to a reference segmentation for the bladder. A 6mm surface distance was used to validate the prostate results. Varying the outlier threshold level produced a receiver operating characteristic with area under the curve of 0.89 for the bladder and 0.92 for the prostate. Based on this preliminary result, our method has been able to predict local segmentation failures and shows potential for validation in an automatic segmentation pipeline