Water Quality in the Gillham Lake-Cossatot River System During Dry and Wet Periods

Water samples were collected in the Cossatot River-Gillham Lake system during an extended dry period and after heavy rains to determine the spatial variations in certain water quality characteristics. Of particular interest was the influence of the reservoir discharge on the water quality of the tailwater compared with the effects of four tributaries entering the tailwater below the reservoir. The water quality of the Cossatot River below Gillham Lake at low-flow (dry periods) and during the first 3 days after heavy rainfall (wet period) was influenced more by the tributaries entering the tailwater than by the reservoir water release. We estimated, however, that the amount of particulate inorganic matter released to the tailwater from the reservoir after the initial 3-day wet period would be greater than the amounts entering the tailwater from the tributaries

Nurse telephone triage in out of hours primary care: a pilot study

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The Ohio Grain Marketing Legislation of 1982 and 1983

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Evaluation of a Comprehensive Challenge/Adventure Program for Sexually Abused/Exploited Youth

This study attempted to validate the challenge/adventure methodology as applied to sexually abused/exploited youth in a residential treatment placement by measuring personality and behavioral changes in those youth. The Fresh Start Program is a special living and learning placement for youth between the ages of 12-18. Youth in placement typically present a complex and variable assortment of educational, psychological, and behavioral problems. The youth live in foster family homes, which operate under the Family Education Model for behavioral management and behavioral improvement There are two homes on the grounds of the large camp and retreat center facility in Northern Wisconsin, and the youth attend a special education school on the ground. Average length of stay in the placement is 12 months. The challenge/adventure program overlaps the academic curriculum, and the counseling program, as it is the teachers and therapist who facilitate the challenge/adventure sequence. In a typical school year of 180 days, the youth spend about 140 days in school, and about 40 days on special adventure trips. The whole program for psychological and educational intervention was complexly interwoven with the challenge/adventure program, and it is thus difficult to ascertain the influence of the various dimensions of the total system. It might be argued that is study would be better titled a an evaluation of a comprehensive placement and treatment program, not of the challenge/adventure methodology. However, the Fresh Start Program represents a unique model for residential treatment placement, in that the whole program was designed to follow challenge /adventure theory and practice. It can be argued, thus, that any study on the impact of the program can be viewed as quite relevant to the question of validating challenge/adventure programming. The data were collected from 13 youth including 7 males and 6 females. The age range was 12-18 with an average of 14,8. All of the youth had a comprehensive psychological and psychoeducational diagnostic evaluation prior to placement and multi-disciplinary staffing bad assigned a primary psychoeducational diagnosis of behavior disorder. The pre-placement psychological and psychoeducational evaluation provided data on academic achievement based on both the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) and the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT). When the youth entered the program they were given the Tennessee Self-Concept Inventory. At the end of the first week of placement, four adults who bad had interaction with the youth filed out the Jesness Behavior Checklist (JBC). All four tests were administered at the termination of placement. This study essentially involved comparison of the pre-program and early placement data to that at termination of placement. Because of the small number of subjects, there were no statistical analyses of the data. Instead, the results are shown as tabular and graphic summaries. Based on these data, it appeared that gains were great in academic achievement as measured by WRAT and PIAT. It was suggested that self­ concept gains were the Etest in the areas of identity awareness, the concept of self as physical beings, and in social concept. Many have criticized assessment of self-concept changes in any study attempting to validate challenge/adventure methodology, arguing that increases in self-concept may or may not be accompanied by actual behavior changes. In theory, increased self-concept should bring improved social behavior. The results of the JBC showed that there were a number of positive behavioral changes in the youth. The results were discussed in terms of validation of the total challenge/adventure methodology. It was recognized that the complexity of the total living and learning program made it difficult to factor out specific dimensions of the program as causative in the improvements n self-concept, behavior, and academic achievement. However, because the total program was designed around the challenge/adventure methodology, the results do seem to offer some validation of the approach

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationNatural products are structurally complex molecules and often exhibit intriguing biological activities. They are, however, notoriously difficult to supply, whether by chemical synthesis or isolation from a living organism. Recently, reconstitution of natural product biosynthetic pathways in a heterologous host has proved a successful strategy for producing natural products in vivo, but has rarely achieved the level of sustainability desired for medicinal applications. This approach is limited by our lack of understanding of biosynthesis and pathway expression. The focus of this dissertation is biosynthetic strategies for the supply of therapeutically-relevant natural products. Two examples are included, one involving a biosynthetic outlook of a known family of compounds with an uncharacterized metabolic origin, and a second uniting discovery, production, and biological characterization of a novel anti-HIV compound. The adociasulfates are a family of marine sponge-derived meroterpenes known to inhibit kinesin, making them attractive anticancer drug leads. Despite difficulties in synthesizing adociasulfates, biosynthesis has never been investigated as a potential means of production. In Chapter 1, detailed consideration is given to the biosynthetic origin of these compounds, revealing a set of just four possible precursors for all sponge merotriterpenes. The mechanism of action of adociasulfates, addressed in Chapter 2, was shown to occur in a 1:1 interaction with kinesin, contrary to previous reports of microtubule-mimicking aggregates. Adociasulfates are thus shown to be valuable tools for the study of kinesin and maintain potential therapeutic importance, making their production an ever more important goal. The discovery, production, and biological characterization of an anti-HIV lanthipeptide, divamide A, is described in Chapter 3. The divamides were discovered from small tunicates from Papua New Guinea. By integrating structure- and genomics-based methodologies, we were able to elucidate the structure of a small amount of isolated material. This approach also provided us with a biosynthetic platform from which heterologous expression and sustainable production were achieved in Escherichia coli. The structure activity relationships of the divamides show that functional diversity is achieved by introducing minor structural changes to a conserved chemical scaffold Finally, an extended family of related peptides was identified that bears some of the hallmarks of known diversity-generating pathways

Permutation Inference for Canonical Correlation Analysis

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) has become a key tool for population neuroimaging, allowing investigation of associations between many imaging and non-imaging measurements. As other variables are often a source of variability not of direct interest, previous work has used CCA on residuals from a model that removes these effects, then proceeded directly to permutation inference. We show that such a simple permutation test leads to inflated error rates. The reason is that residualisation introduces dependencies among the observations that violate the exchangeability assumption. Even in the absence of nuisance variables, however, a simple permutation test for CCA also leads to excess error rates for all canonical correlations other than the first. The reason is that a simple permutation scheme does not ignore the variability already explained by previous canonical variables. Here we propose solutions for both problems: in the case of nuisance variables, we show that transforming the residuals to a lower dimensional basis where exchangeability holds results in a valid permutation test; for more general cases, with or without nuisance variables, we propose estimating the canonical correlations in a stepwise manner, removing at each iteration the variance already explained, while dealing with different number of variables in both sides. We also discuss how to address the multiplicity of tests, proposing an admissible test that is not conservative, and provide a complete algorithm for permutation inference for CCA.Comment: 49 pages, 2 figures, 10 tables, 3 algorithms, 119 reference

Real-time 3D Archaeological Field Recording: Development of an interoperable open-source GIS data entry system.

This project will develop and test a real-time 3D data recording interface for on-the-field archaeological excavations that will be applicable to different time periods, contexts and recording nomenclature. In 2010, this open-source, OS independent, web-based GIS application called ArchField was developed for excavations in Jordan. It is now imperative to begin the second stage of streamlining the software to make it easily adapted to different archaeological projects. The proposed application is an open GIS that can communicate with different spatially oriented user interfaces (e.g. Google Earth) for visualization and analysis. This system is built by archaeologists for archaeological excavation and digital conservation. Its ability includes association of all field data with 3D coordinates and auto-generation of for daily top plans in real-time. The end goal is to provide an easily available and user-friendly digital archaeological system to facilitate the dissemination online of advanced digital recording and mapping techniques to a broad audience

A Systematic Review of the Uptake and Adherence Rates to Supervised Exercise Programs in Patients with Intermittent Claudication

Background Intermittent claudication (IC) is a common and debilitating symptom of peripheral arterial disease and is associated with a significant reduction in a sufferer's quality of life. Guidelines recommend a supervised exercise program (SEP) as the primary treatment option; however, anecdotally there is a low participation rate for exercise in this group of patients. We undertook a systematic review of the uptake and adherence rates to SEPs for individuals with IC. Methods The MEDLINE, Embase, and PubMed databases were searched up to January 2015 for terms related to supervised exercise in peripheral arterial disease. The review had 3 aims: first, to establish the rates of uptake to SEPs, second, the rates of adherence to programs, and finally to determine the reasons reported for poor uptake and adherence. Separate inclusion and/or exclusion criteria were applied in selecting reports for each aim of the review. Results Only 23 of the 53 potentially eligible articles for uptake analysis identified on literature searches reported any details of screened patients (n = 7,517) with only 24.2% of patients subsequently recruited to SEPs. Forty-five percent of screen failures had no reason for exclusion reported. Sixty-seven articles with 4,012 patients were included for analysis of SEP adherence. Overall, 75.1% of patients reportedly completed an SEP; however, only one article defined a minimal attendance required for SEP completion. Overall, 54.1% of incomplete adherence was due to patient withdrawal and no reason for incomplete adherence was reported for 16% of cases. Conclusions Reporting of SEP trials was poor with regard to the numbers of subjects screened and reasons for exclusions. Only approximately 1 in 3 screened IC patients was suitable for and willing to undertake SEP. Levels of adherence to SEPs and definitions of satisfactory adherence were also lacking in most the current literature. Current clinical guidelines based on this evidence base may not be applicable to most IC patients and changes to SEPs may be needed to encourage and/or retain participants

Audio-visual speech perception: a developmental ERP investigation

Being able to see a talking face confers a considerable advantage for speech perception in adulthood. However, behavioural data currently suggest that children fail to make full use of these available visual speech cues until age 8 or 9. This is particularly surprising given the potential utility of multiple informational cues during language learning. We therefore explored this at the neural level. The event-related potential (ERP) technique has been used to assess the mechanisms of audio-visual speech perception in adults, with visual cues reliably modulating auditory ERP responses to speech. Previous work has shown congruence-dependent shortening of auditory N1/P2 latency and congruence-independent attenuation of amplitude in the presence of auditory and visual speech signals, compared to auditory alone. The aim of this study was to chart the development of these well-established modulatory effects over mid-to-late childhood. Experiment 1 employed an adult sample to validate a child-friendly stimulus set and paradigm by replicating previously observed effects of N1/P2 amplitude and latency modulation by visual speech cues; it also revealed greater attenuation of component amplitude given incongruent audio-visual stimuli, pointing to a new interpretation of the amplitude modulation effect. Experiment 2 used the same paradigm to map cross-sectional developmental change in these ERP responses between 6 and 11 years of age. The effect of amplitude modulation by visual cues emerged over development, while the effect of latency modulation was stable over the child sample. These data suggest that auditory ERP modulation by visual speech represents separable underlying cognitive processes, some of which show earlier maturation than others over the course of development