Sewanee: The University of the South
Sewanee DSpace Repository (The University of the South)Not a member yet
4066 research outputs found
Sort by
The Impact of Parental Size on The Effectiveness of Parental Care
No full textIn animals with parental care the amount or quality of care the parent provides can have a large impact on the development of the offsprings phenotype and ultimately it’s fitness. Variation in the quality of parental care is often associated with variation in other aspects of the parental phenotype. For example, in the burying beetle (Niceophorus vespilloides) the effectiveness of parental care is determined by maternal size. The large mother is providing better care than small mothers. In the study, I conducted to experiment to test whether they’re similar size base parental effects in another burying beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis. The species differs from. N. vespilloides in two important ways. First, parental care in N. orbicollis is obligate while it is facultative in N. vespilloides. Second, biparental care is beneficial in N. orbicollis while males do not appear to contribute much in N. Vespilloides. My first experiment focused solely on the impact of female body size on the effectiveness of parental care. I phenotypicslly engineered females to be large or small and then measured their reproductive performance. I found that large female broods produced broods of larger offspring than small females, consistent with the pattern seen in previous studies of N. vespilloides. My second experiment examined the joint effects of female and male body size on the effectiveness of parental care. I conducted crosses in which I factorially manipulated parental body size, and for each cross, I recorded the number and size of offspring that were produced. I found the female body size influence, the offspring size at dispersal; however, there were no affects of male size or the interaction between male and female size. My results demonstrate size dependent maternal effects in N. orbicollis, with bigger mothers providing more effective parental care than smaller mothers. Furthermore, male body size does not appear to influence the number or size of offspring produced, either directly or through an interaction with female size. These results show that mothers have the primary influence over offspring size.Dr. Matthew Schrader, Lucy Rudman, Sewanee SUR
End the Payday Loan Scam
No full textPredatory payday, title, and flex loans are a growing affliction in low-income communities that lead people to pay hundreds in interest and fees every month yet never pay down their loans. Our non-profit partner BetterFi offers those borrowers a pathway out of debt traps and toward financial fitness by refinancing their loans at reasonable rates, as well as offering new loans to those who qualify. Using past client data, we will develop predictive models which will create a more efficient and scalable way for BetterFi to service the community and end the cycle of debt.Sam Shaw, Spike Hosch, Huarui Jing, BetterF
Effect of Birth Order on Educational Attainment
Get PDFIn 2014, 79% of parents had two or more children, and a majority of parents would agree that they want success for all of their children (Livingston 2020). Educational attainment commonly proxies for success, and birth order has been identified as a possible variable that may negatively impact a child’s educational attainment. In order to promote success for all siblings, this paper seeks to answer the following question: what is the effect of birth order on educational attainment? Utilizing the Wisconsin Longitudinal dataset, I employ a pooled cross-sectional analysis and find a significantly negative relationship (at the 1% level) where a one position increase in birth order leads to a 0.73% decrease in years of education on average. This negative relationship signals that educational and parental resources may need to be shifted in order to assist younger siblings.N/A: Advised by Dr. Aaron Elro
Monitoring and Modeling Salinity to Improve Water Quality of an Urban Retention Pond
Get PDFWildlife in riparian ecosystems require specific water quality conditions for key variables such as temperature, nutrients, and dissolved oxygen. Humans alter natural water systems to reduce flood risk and facilitate stormwater drainage. Modifying natural waterways, or hydromodification, in the form of regional retention ponds is gaining popularity as a solution to urban flooding. In this study, we examined and monitored the salinity of an urban retention pond in a Louisiana city park to lay the foundation for a series of necessary studies that address water quality and biological issues associated with flood mitigation tactics. Through field data collection at nine different sites and numerical modeling, we hypothesized that urban retention ponds may accumulate contaminants and pose a risk to biodiversity and public health. Some of the specific factors leading to water quality deterioration are hypoxia, localized chloride pollution, and temperature fluctuations due to sedimentation. The results of this study showed high salinity levels at the bottom of one area of the urban pond that do not disperse throughout the pond. Our results suggest that elevated salinity levels in the pond are likely the result of runoff from a nearby medical complex. Whether the specific source of the saline water is from cleaning operations, medical wastewater, or site construction activity requires further investigation. This study can be used to encourage flood risk managers to consider water quality of urban retention systems in greater detail.National Science Foundatio
Investigating ER Overuse Project Proposal and Final Report
No full textGrundy County is defined as a Medically Underserved Area (MUA), meaning that the county lacks the health care services required to adequately meet community needs. Research shows that across the U.S. in rural MUAs, citizens are increasingly seeking primary care at ERs. Our partner believes that analyzing ER discharge data may offer helpful insight into how Grundy County is medically underserved. Our team’s objective is to create an interactive dashboard that expresses trends in ER discharge data from Grundy County and the surrounding area to aid the SCHN in creating solutions to Grundy’s health service shortage.The South Cumberland Plateau (SCP) is made up of three counties, Grundy, Franklin, and Marion, all of which are defined as "medically underserved" by the Health Resources and Services Administration. This means that these communities lack the primary health care services and providers necessary to sufficiently meet residents' needs. Our partner, the South Cumberland Health Network (SCHN), wants to understand how these communities are being medically underserved. Our work this summer is dedicated to investigating trends in emergency room use from the South Cumberland Plateau in order to better understand how the community is medically underserved. The insight gained from our findings will inform the South Cumberland Health Network's advocacy moving forward aimed at closing the health care service gaps within these communities.Jim Peterman, Myles Elledge, South Cumberland Health Network (SCHN
Fracture Characterization of McMurdo Dry Valley Sandstones with Ilastik Machine Learning Image Segmentation Software
No full textSubcritical fracturing, or fracturing driven by stresses below the failure strength of a material, is increasingly recognized as one of the most important processes in rock weathering. Most environmental stresses, such as thermal stresses from solar heating, are well below the failure strength of rock, so most fracturing is subcritical. In order to understand rates and controls on subcritical fracture processes in nature, it is necessary to amass large datasets on natural microfractures. However, thoroughly characterizing fractures takes many hours of tedious work for each sample, which has limited data availability. We present a new workflow for fracture characterization using Ilastik machine learning image segmentation software. We have trained our model to identify open voids, obstructed voids, fractures, non-fracture lineations, quartz grains, and other mineral grains in sandstones by identifying regions of the image on a pixel-by-pixel categorization basis and further hone in by determining whether the shape of questionable areas is likely to be a fracture. The software can create predictive models of unlabeled areas and gets better in real-time with additional training data, massively improving the speed of data collection. The computer-generated data compare reasonably well with manually-identified fracture data from the same sample. The sandstones we are analyzing are from the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica, one of the coldest and driest places on earth, with long periods of daylight and darkness during the summer and winter. These factors combine to produce unusually slow weathering rates, making it an interesting end-member field site. Our samples have been dated for exposure using cosmogenic isotopes beryllium-10 and aluminum-26. Some of these rocks have been exposed at the surface for two million years. The chronosequence of fracture densities reveals a linear increase in the total number of fractures per unit area with time, but a nonlinear increase in the total fracture length per unit area, indicating that weathering by subcritical fracture may start fast, then slow, perhaps when many fractures in favorable positions and orientations in the stress field have fully propagated through a rock and only less favorable ones remain