Enhancement of Gulf killifish, Fundulus grandis, fitness and reproduction

Gulf killifish, Fundulus grandis, shows promise for commercial development as a marine baitfish species. Significant markets for F. grandis already exist throughout the Gulf Coast, with the vast majority of supply coming from wild-harvests, which can be hampered by seasonal availability and inconsistent fish health and size. The genus Fundulus also represents an important group of model vertebrates for biological study. A recent review paper described this genus as the premier teleost model for environmental biology. New information generated as a result of the work contained in this dissertation may be more broadly applicable to sister species of F. grandis, enhancing the primary goal of improving reproductive output and fitness in cultured individuals of this species. Results of this dissertation include optimization of culture salinity, female broodfish body size, and dietary lipid composition. Optimal salinity for culture of juvenile F. grandis was 12.0‰, with growth incrementally increasing between 0.5, 5.0, 8.0, and 12.0‰. Survival was negatively affected at 0.5‰. Optimal body size for female broodfish was 12-13 g. Minimum size recommended for broodfish was 7 g and per-unit-mass fecundity begins to level off in females greater than 13 g. Fecundity of F. grandis was less sensitive to manipulations of dietary lipid content than many other fishes. No difference in fecundity was found among fish fed isonitrogenous diets ranging in lipid content from 4.0 to 13.8%. Excess lipid was mostly stored in the intraperitoneal cavity, rather than being partitioned for reproduction. Dietary lipid composition produced very little effect on overall fecundity in F. grandis, despite experimental diets with very different fatty acid (FA) composition. Differences did occur in subsequent larvae at extreme physiological conditions, but these variations were unlikely to have any effect on survival in culture or natural settings. Examinations of FA dynamics across time revealed that F. grandis likely utilizes a combination of mobilization from somatic reserves and de novo biosynthesis of long chain polyunsaturated FAs to compensate for dietary FA deficiency. Overall, the characteristic physiological plasticity of F. grandis also applied to lipid dynamics

Aristotelian philosophy applied to interactive virtual media: on the effects of transportation on the player and the practical applications of virtual realities

Virtual reality is a new technology that blurs the line between what a person feels is real and knows is fake; putting the audience ‘inside’ a piece of art, a new ‘world’ that we can experience (like real life) in a first-person perspective. This technology has come about through the development of interactive virtual media, the product of ‘the evolution of poetry’ that Aristotle discovered and explained. Poetry is something that can hold and transfer meaning, specifically it is anything that can offer or represent the ‘what it is likeness’ of a particular concept or truth, this is what I refer to when I use the term ‘Poetry’. The concept of blurring the line between reality and fiction, gives rise to ‘the paradox of fiction’ and has been a component of art from its conception. We lose ourselves in a myth, a book, a song or a play, and we have emotions about imitations of (fictional) events (even though they are fictional), this losing oneself into poetry is what I will term ‘Transportation’. Virtual realities achieve this and can make us feel like we are inside a piece of art, by fully taking control of our perspective (our experiences), by putting the control of the art’s direction in our hands, and importantly, by captivating our full attention. What effects could this have on us as moral agents or as social beings? Aristotle began art criticism in his Poetics, pioneering the philosophy of aesthetics and preparing philosophers for their own explorations of new mediums of art. I plan on continuing this work in an Aristotelian exploration of the use of interactive virtual media and the notion of transportation. Not only will I use the lessons learnt from Aristotle’s work in Poetics, but will also consider an Aristotelian Eudemian framework when looking at the moral concerns of such an advanced form of poetry and the inherent ramifications of the ‘habituation’ that comes with its repetitive use. Such media is often seen as an unproductive and even sometimes damaging pastime, I will argue that not only does all poetry teach us in many ways, but interactive virtual media has the potential to teach us the ‘what it is likeness’ of particular experiences. It allows us to practice and attain ‘know how’ types of knowledge, this will be crucial to my Aristotelian philosophical exploration, and the revelations about the possible dispositional attitudes that could be gained from said practice in virtual environments. I will back this up with a comprehensive explanation of recent revelations in cognitive science, proving evidence for the habituation mechanism and the importance of our implicit memory in our judgement making processes. I will conclude that interactive virtual media provides the perfect medium for transportation, which results in the accumulation of new implicit memories in the player (habituation), and said environments will be able to be utilised for a variety of applications, one possibly being the practice of virtuous activity (Eudemian ethics)

Augustana Seniors Fall 1883: Peter Albert Fair

Peter Albert Fair was a senior at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, in the fall of 1883. His name appears in the college catalog of 1883 – 1884, along with his birthplace, the year of his birth, and a few other facts. From this start, we researched the genealogy and family history of Peter Albert Fair. This paper contains a short biography of Peter Albert Fair, a report on his ancestors, a report on his descendants, and some open questions for further researc

Electronic Health Record-Based Surveillance for Community Transmitted COVID-19 in the Emergency Department

Introduction: SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus, manifests as a respiratory syndrome (COVID-19) and is the cause of an ongoing pandemic. The response to COVID-19 in the United States has been hampered by an overall lack of diagnostic testing capacity. To address uncertainty about ongoing levels of SARS-CoV-2 community transmission early in the pandemic, we aimed to develop a surveillance tool using readily available emergency department (ED) operations data extracted from the electronic health record (EHR). This involved optimizing the identification of acute respiratory infection (ARI)-related encounters and then comparing metrics for these encounters before and after the confirmation of SARS-CoV-2 community transmission.Methods: We performed an observational study using operational EHR data from two Midwest EDs with a combined annual census of over 80,000. Data were collected three weeks before and after the first confirmed case of local SARS-CoV-2 community transmission. To optimize capture of ARI cases, we compared various metrics including chief complaint, discharge diagnoses, and ARI-related orders. Operational metrics for ARI cases, including volume, pathogen identification, and illness severity, were compared between the pre- and post-community transmission timeframes using chi-square tests of independence.Results: Compared to our combined definition of ARI, chief complaint, discharge diagnoses, and isolation orders individually identified less than half of the cases. Respiratory pathogen testing was the top performing individual ARI definition but still only identified 72.2% of cases. From the pre to post periods, we observed significant increases in ED volumes due to ARI and ARI cases without identified pathogen.Conclusion: Certain methods for identifying ARI cases in the ED may be inadequate and multiple criteria should be used to optimize capture. In the absence of widely available SARS-CoV-2 testing, operational metrics for ARI-related encounters, especially the proportion of cases involving negative pathogen testing, are useful indicators for active surveillance of potential COVID-19 related ED visits

TinyTermite: A Secure Routing Algorithm

In this thesis, we introduce TinyTermite. TinyTermite is a novel probabilistic routing algorithm that is secure against selective forwarding and replay attacks. We use suspicion pheromone to build a flexible map of possible compromised neighbors. As suspicion builds up and decays for each neighbor, TinyTermite is able to deal with uncertain stimulus and react properly. TinyTermite is fully implemented on TinyOS based Intel Mote 2 platform and the experiments were done to compare its performance with that of the traditional Termite algorithm. The experimental results show that TinyTermite is significantly more secure against replay and sinkhole attacks by lowering the packet loss from 88.5% to 32.9% with 12.7% normal packet loss. The experimental results also demonstrate that the TinyTermite provides high throughput and low latency. uspicion pheromone is added to Termite that defends against the selective forwarding and replay attacks. In our experiments we implemented a detection scheme for the replay attack and show how countermeasures can be employed in TinyTermite. We found the suspicious pheromone technique to be quite effective against a replay attack coupled with a selective forwarding attack. The suspicion defense mechanism in TinyTermite provided a significantly better defense against the attacker than Termite alone. The implementation of TinyTermite on the Imote2 platform was measured with respect to throughput, latency, and packet loss. We examine and measure the basic packet transmission mechanics between nodes on the Imote2 platform and suggest settings for better quality operations

Ionic partitioning of KCl in AOT reverse micelles from molecular dynamics simulations

Reverse micelles are an important class of nanoreactors providing an array of applications. The structure and dynamics of aqueous reverse micelles have been intensely investigated, yet there are many subtleties involved in characterizing the arrangement of water and ionic species within these aggregates. The interfacial arrangement of water and dopants added to bis(2-ethylhexyl) sulfosuccinate sodium salt (AOT) reverse micelles were investigated by fully atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. Reverse micelles of increasing water to surfactant ratio were doped with concentrations of KCl from 0.0 to 1.0 M to analyze the partitioning of ions and water. Detailed analysis of pair density functions reveals that Cl− ions are embedded deep in the aqueous interior, and the K+ ions display a remarkable affinity for the interface. Our results confirm the existence of multiple layers of water, and an ordered multi-layer ionic arrangement that is driven by the negatively charged surfactant headgroup

The role of African dust in the formation of Quaternary soils on Mallorca, Spain and implications for the genesis of Red Mediterranean soils

African dust additions explain the origin of terra rossa soils that are common on the carbonate-platform island of Mallorca, Spain. Mineralogical and geochemical analyses indicate that Quaternary carbonate eolianites on Mallorca have a very high purity, usually composed of more than 90% carbonate minerals (calcite, dolomite, and aragonite). In contrast, terra rossa soils developed on these eolianites have lower carbonate contents and contain higher concentrations of quartz and other silicates. Analyses of immobile trace elements indicate that the non-carbonate fractions of the eolianites have distinctive Zr/Hf, La/Yb, Cr/Sc and Th/Ta values that differ from the superjacent terra rossa soils. These observations indicate that even if suf!cient dissolution of the eolianite had taken place to create the soils by residual accumulation, immobile element ratios in the soils require an external source. However, Zr/Hf, La/Yb, Cr/Sc and Th/Ta values in the soils fall within the range of values for these element ratios in African dust collected on Barbados and mainland Spain. We conclude that the silicate fractions of terra rossa soils on Mallorca are derived mainly, though not wholly, from far-traveled African dust, and this process may explain the origin of other terra rossa soils found in southern Europe