The Water Isn’t Safe: The Dismal State of Texas Drinking Water Regulation

This project won first place in the 2018 Signature Course Information Literacy Award. The award recognizes exemplary student work that achieves the learning outcomes of the Signature Course information literacy requirement, that students will be able to create and execute a research strategy, critically evaluate information, and navigate the scholarly conversation. The paper was nominated by Jane Cohen from the School of Law after it was submitted in her Fall 2018 Signature Course “Water, Ethics, Law, and Policy.” The project was chosen for its exceptional use of sources from government documents to journalism to build a compelling argument. Dr. Cohen supported this project by saying "Grace began this project innocent of all knowledge about this situation, other than her rural Texan grandmother's sadness over the brief longevity of her pets. She built a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the regulatory environment literally hand-over-hand, with a superb research effort all her own.Cohen, JaneUT Librarie

Ecohealth research in Southeast Asia : past, present and the way forward

Ecohealth is a comprehensive approach to understanding health at its human, animal and environmental interface in a socio-ecological systems context. This approach was introduced widely in Southeast Asia (SEA) by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in the late 2000s. Aimed at addressing the problem of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), numerous such projects and activities have been generated throughout the region. Ecohealth is increasingly converging with the One Health approach, as both movements emphasise a holistic understanding to health. We conducted a scoping review by considering all of the Ecohealth programmes, initiatives and projects that have been implemented in SEA since the introduction of the approach, and also gathered information from peer-reviewed literature. The objective of this paper is to review Ecohealth activities within SEA over the last 10 years to address the lessons learned, challenges faced and the way forward for Ecohealth in the region. Activities range from those focusing purely on capacity, projects focusing on research and projects covering both. Achievements to date include, for example, research contributing to the field of infectious diseases in relation to social ecological factors and associated urbanisation and agricultural intensification. Challenges remain at the project design and implementation level, in the available capacity and coordination to develop Ecohealth research teams in the countries, gauging teams' assimilation of Ecohealth's underlying tenets and their translation into sustainable disease prevention and control, as well as in the ability to scale up Ecohealth projects. We suggest that the way forward for Ecohealth should be from a regional perspective in terms of research, training and policy translation using Ecohealth in combination with the One Health approach

Energy and economic analysis of environmental upgrading of existing office buildings

Over many decades, buildings have been recognised as a significant area contributing to the negative impacts on the environment over their lifecycle, accelerating climate change. In return, climate change also impacts on buildings with extreme heatwaves occurring more frequently and raising the earth’s temperature. The operation phase is the most extended period over a building’s lifespan. In this period, office buildings consume most energy and emit the highest amount of greenhouse gas pollution into the environment. Building upgrading to improve energy efficiency seems to be the best way to cut pollution as the existing building stock is massive. The paper presents an economic analysis of energy efficiency upgrade of buildings with a focus of office buildings. The paper identifies upgrading activities that are commonly undertaken to upgrade energy efficiency of office buildings and a case study of three office buildings in Sydney, Australia has been used to analyse the results. The upgrading activities can improve the energy performance of the case study buildings from 3 stars to 5 stars NABERS energy rating in compliance with the mandatory requirement in the Australian government’s energy policy. With the potential increase in energy price, energy efficiency upgrading will become more affordable, but currently, most of them, except solar panels and motion sensors show a negative return and would not be undertaken if they did not also contribute to higher rental income and an increased life span of the building. The upgrading discussed in the paper represent a potentially attractive alternative to demolition and building anew

THE SEATED-SINGLE-ARM-ROW AS A POST-ACTIVATION POTENTIATION EXERCISE TO ENHANCE POWER OUTPUT DURING KAYAKING ON AN ERGOMETER

This study investigated if the seated-single-arm-row (SSAR) could be used as a post-activation-potentiation-exercise (PAPE) during warm up to induce enhanced power output during kayaking on an ergometer. Ten well-trained kayakers (4 females, 6 males) performed three repetitions of the SSAR at 91% one-repetition maximum as the PAPE. Participants were assessed for their peak and average power output while performing 14 maximal effort strokes on a kayak ergometer; to simulate a race start; with versus without PAPE as a warm up, at three-minute intervals up to 18 minutes. Mean peak power with PAPE was found to be approximately 6% higher (1172.5 vs 1106.8 W) compared with no PAPE, t(9)=2.61, p=0.03. No differences in mean average power were found. Six out of the 10 kayakers registered higher mean peak and average power in one of their experimental trials compared with their control trial. These kayakers could be positive responders to PAPE. The SSAR performed during warm up enabled kayakers to increase their peak power output when paddling on an ergometer, but did not result in higher average power output. The utility of the SSAR as a PAPE to enhance overall power output when paddling on an ergometer, with the perspective of applying this technique to enhance performance during on-water kayaking, requires further investigation

Adoption and impact of gaps in pig value chains: Implications for institutional policy and practice change

This paper investigates the adoption of VietGAHP, a set of guidelines for best practices in pig production, and evaluates impacts using quantitative and qualitative indicators. It tackles the following specific research questions: 1) What is the extent of adoption of VietGAHP among smallholder pig producers? 2) Is there a difference in performance between VietGAHP adopters and non-adopters? Outcomes from adoption and compliance with VietGAHP are assessed using reduction in mortality as a metric for efficacy. Cost-benefit comparisons are also made to illustrate economic outcomes as a measure of effectiveness. We employ statistical t-tests for mean comparison of outcomes between VietGAHP adopters and non-adopters and across exposed and control sites. Our study shows productivity gains from practice and behavioral changes elicited from adoption and compliance with VietGAHP outweigh the costs of doing so, at least at the household level. The observed economic and market incentives could boost the adoption of VietGAHP if these incentives are sustained with appropriate institutions in place. Scalability could be facilitated by exposure via demonstration effects. Peer-to-peer learning is an effective strategy in enhancing capacity for uptake. With exposure being strongly linked to uptake, regardless of gender of respondents, training opportunities for non-exposed groups are worthwhile to pursue

A decade of One Health and Ecohealth in Southeast Asia: Inventory and perspectives

South East Asia (SEA) is a hot spot for diseases emergence as demonstrated for HPAI and SARS. To address challenges on disease emergence in livestock and human such as urbanisation, agriculture intensification, land use changes and others new integrated approaches have been increasingly introduced to the region to facilitated collaboration across disciplines, groups and stakeholders. Those approaches include the ‘ecohealth’ (EH) and ‘onehealth’ (OH) concept, both focusing on integrated research but having a different history and characteristics. The EH approach was pioneered over the last decades by the International Development Research Centre, Canada (IDRC). The OH concept builds up on Schwabe’s One Medicine and is currently institutionalised by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and FAO. To promote EH in the region, ILRI implemented an EH capacity building project (EcoZD) funded by IDRC between 2008 and 2013. The project targeted six Southeast Asian countries. In each country an across-disciplines research team was formed and implemented an EH case study aligned with capacity building on transdisciplinary research. In a subsequent step, ‘onehealth-ecohealth’ resource centres were established in three universities/institutions in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. For this paper we also screened selected other OH/EH initiatives implemented since 2004 in SEA for their focus and impact. Most initiatives emphasised on capacity building others mainly on research or both. Challenges are various and complex, such as ‘loose’ or overlapping defi- nitions of OH/EH, cultural barriers, silo thinking, lack of qualitative research skills. While the use of integrated research has been successfully demonstrated in case studies (e.g. for Brucellosis in Yunnan) donor dependency, limited impact assessments of the added value of used integrated approaches and coordination gaps among the various initiatives remain a challenges and need more attention in the future

The Effect of Eye Contact on Auditory Recall

Memory is at the basis of perception and provides functionality to our daily lives. Auditory stimulation has been shown to bias eye movement and improve memory (Liping, et. al, 2021), but the mechanisms behind the guidance of eye movements remain unclear (Higgins, et. al, 2014). This study investigates the correlation between eye contact and memory, focusing on recall, and exploring eye contact’s potential to enhance recall during both immediate and delayed assessments (Craft 21 Recall). Thirty undergraduate students from Belmont University, completed the Craft 21 Recall assessment after watching a video featuring a virtual speaker reading a short story. The participants were exposed to either eye contact or no eye contact stimuli, and their maintenance of eye contact with the speaker was recorded using an eye tracker. Additionally, this research aims to distinguish recall outcomes based on the participants\u27 personality types, using the Eysenck Personality Inventory. The objective is to investigate whether different personality types have an impact on recall. It is hypothesized that establishing eye contact with the speaker would influence individualized emotional responses, enabling stronger memory connections that would be reflected in the recall assessment. To manipulate the independent variable (eye contact), an eye tracker was used to ensure that participants maintained eye contact in accordance with their randomly assigned stimuli. The predicted results indicate that eye contact improves recall and that extroverts show higher levels of recall. The study\u27s findings are novel and further research is needed to better understand the relationship between eye contact and memory

Gingival Taste Bud Papillae Associated with Retromolar Salivary Gland

Taste in the gustatory system allows to distinguish between safe and harmful food, and to gauge its nutritional value. Digestive enzymes in saliva begin to dissolve food into base chemicals that are detected by taste buds containing three different cell types involved in the perception of the five basic tastes. Von Ebner\u27s glands, found adjacent to the moats surrounding the circumvallate (CV) and foliate papillae, are exocrine salivary glands that secrete digestive enzymes and presumably flush material out of the papillae. Recently, we rediscovered and characterized anatomically and molecularly a chemosensory structure in the mouse oral cavity consisting of unorganized taste buds associated with ducts and a gland at the rear of the mandible, distal to the last molar and anterior to the ascending ramus. These taste buds appear to be the same ones first described by Iida in 1983, Miller in 1984, and characterized for sensory responses by Travers et al. in 1995 (Miller and Smith 1984, Travers and Norgren 1995). Here we used immunohistochemistry and RT-PCR to characterize this gingival chemosensory structure, consisting of taste buds and a minor salivary gland. Similar to the CV and foliate papillae, this novel retromolar chemosensory structure contains taste buds surrounding the orifice of ducts originating from a salivary gland (morphologically similar to the Von Ebner\u27s glands). This salivary gland is located below the mucosa of the retromolar gap, extending posteriorly in the retromolar trigone. Above the gland and ducts, taste buds are positioned on the surface of the retromolar gingival epithelium, surrounding the duct orifices. We determined that these taste buds have chemosensory features expressing many canonical taste signaling elements, including taste receptors. The composition of the secretions from the retromolar gland is unknown. The retromolar taste buds are responsible for a small portion of sensory gustatory perception (Travers and Norgren 1995). Interestingly, patients have reported taste changes following procedures involving third molar extraction, possibly due to the disruption of the retromolar tissue (Shafer, Frank et al. 1999, Akal, Kucukyavuz et al. 2004, Klasser, Utsman et al. 2008, Ridaura-Ruiz, Figueiredo et al. 2012). The retromolar taste structure possibly plays a role in taste perception and represents a potential novel pharmacological target for taste or dry mouth disorders