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Item 4: Assignment 1: Cultural Immersion: A Group Documentary Project
No full textThis assignment asks students to explore how Indonesia is global. Working in small groups of 2 or 3 with an Indonesian student, the group will spend several afternoons and evenings with a host family, documenting local cultural activities in Jambi that are signs of globalization. Each group will prepare a concise documentary project that uses photos and/or video to explore a specific global topic in Jambi. Topics might include food, fashion, entertainment, advertising, automobiles, educational systems, language, religion, ethnicity, etc. Students will explore how the local cultures have incorporated or contributed to the burgeoning global cultures that define Indonesia in the twenty-first century
Item 5: Assignment 1: Shakespeare for Civic Action
No full textThis is the assignment sheet for the paper that follows from the archival research activity described in Activity 1. The paper asks students to discuss educational facilities as places for civic engagement and Shakespearean productions, and to draw on archival resources to explore how race and segregation affect Shakespearean production within those facilities. Students will have read and performed archival research on The Taming of the Shrew and will have watched 10 Things I Hate About You
Emergent groups and the informal digital emergent response to Hurricane Florence in the United States
Get PDFOur study presents a thematic analysis of 1,582 posts from five digital emergent Facebook groups during Hurricane Florence, affecting North and South Carolina in the United States in 2018. We pose four research questions related to the formation and functioning of digital emergent groups during a disaster. Specifically, we examined how groups contributed to response efforts; messages developed across stages of the disaster; grassroots groups’ organized disaster response; and how proximity affected group functioning. Participants contributed to disaster response by sharing and seeking information and aid. Groups coordinated logistics; offered affirmation; and provided commentary and humor. Group members supported the formal response through information sharing. Moreover, group members’ proximity to the disaster and group structures designed to moderate groups were influential in the groups’ goal attainment. We see an opportunity for emergency managers to coordinate with digital emergent groups through trusted sources such as nonprofits active in disaster response. Implications for theory and practice are discussed
Moving the Goalposts: American Sports Coverage in Newspapers and the Construction of Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Olympics in 1928, 1932, 1936.
Get PDFThis thesis takes an in-depth look at the media coverage of women in the Olympics in 1928, 1932 and 1936. Specifically following the track athletes Kinue Hitomi, Louise Stokes, Tidye Pickett and Mildred “Babe” Didrikson the thesis explores how by being athletic women they had their identities as feminine figures heavily questioned and scrutinized in newspapers at the global level. The harshest of these critics was often the American media, who held strict standards of race, gender and sexuality in the late 1920s-mid 1930s. They sought to uphold these standards at the global scale, and the American media’s interrogation of these women’s identities and speculation on their sexuality helped cause a global questioning of acceptable femininity tied to women’s health and social acceptability concerns.
Throughout the three Olympics covered, the women involved had their identities placed on blast at every opportunity. They were accused of being men, they had their builds overexamined and their sexuality and private lives exposed to the public simply for partaking in sports. In addition to this social concern, physical educators and media members feared for the women’s health. They raised concerns regarding their menstrual health, and overall physical ability compared to male athletes, and worried that sports would cause women to become less feminine and potentially lead to death due to menstrual complications. They often ignored the success these athletes brought to their countries and continued to push the globe back to where women could not run track and field.
This thesis finds that while these concerns came from a genuine place, they had incredibly harmful impacts. In 1928, media panic combined with pre-existing anxiety about women’s sports led to the eight-hundred-meter race being removed until 1960, and also implemented harsh sex-testing policies for many years. While the media did not create these fears over women in sports, they worsened them. They continued to echo them and exaggerate them, stirring up more fear in the American (and global) public, created more barriers against women in sports. The conclusion of the thesis shows that despite wider participation for women in sports in the modern day, American media outlets still create harmful barriers to women’s participation, highlighting the particular relevance of this thesis
Evaluation of High Temperature Borehole Heat Exchangers for Thermal Energy Storage
Get PDFThe development of renewable power sources like solar panels and wind turbines is crucial to lowering greenhouse gas emissions and slowing the increase in global temperature. These sources are limited by the intermittency of power output depending on factors such as weather or time of day. Storing energy during periods of peak productivity improves the efficiency of renewable sources and makes them more competitive with fossil fuels. The excess energy can be stored underground as heat. At high enough temperatures (\u3e150ºC) and discharge rates (\u3e70 kW) the stored energy can be converted back into electricity. This turns the subsurface into a “geothermal battery.”
Borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) are used to store and recover subsurface thermal energy. Thermal energy can be stored this way for long periods of time (weeks to months). Storage using BHEs is commonly used for seasonal heating of homes and offices. A high temperature BHE (ht-BHE) would store heat at high enough temperatures to generate electricity with an organic Rankine cycle power block. Conventional BHEs operate at lower (\u3c100ºC) temperatures, so the effectiveness of a ht-BHE is unknown.
The objective of this research is to evaluate the performance of prototype designs for high temperature underground thermal energy storage using a ht-BHE. This objective was met with a combination of laboratory experiments and numerical simulations. Three candidate BHE designs were tested. Two heat exchangers used a U-bend geometry, and another used a coaxial pipe. The heat exchangers were placed in an apparatus made from a steel drum filled with sand and heated with fluid temperatures of 40-60ºC. One of the U-bend heat exchangers was surrounded by a borehole filled with cement grout with a graphite admixture. The coaxial heat exchanger and the other U-bend heat exchanger used boreholes filled with sand. Numerical simulations of the experiments that solve for fluid flow and heat transfer were created in a multiphysics modeling software.
The evaluation analyzed the borehole thermal resistance (BTR) and the energy balance of each heat exchanger design. Three methods of calculating BTR were used. In one, the temperature difference between the heat transfer fluid and the borehole wall was divided by the specific heat injection rate. Another solved for BTR through an analysis of the increase in average fluid temperature. A third method did not use experimental data, but instead calculated BTR with the geometric and thermal parameters of the borehole and heat exchanger pipe. The energy balance compared the change in energy storage to the net energy put in or recovered by the heat exchanger pipe to determine how boundary heat loss limited storage. A storage time constant, the characteristic time for energy storage when 63.2% of energy storage had completed, and a specific storage capacity, describing the power stored for a given BHE length and rise in fluid inlet temperature, describing how quickly the apparatus was able to store energy were developed for each apparatus.
The results of the analyses of experimental data and simulations indicates that BTR calculated using the three methods are similar. The BTR of the U-bend heat exchanger placed in grout is 0.06 Km/W using all methods. The BTR using geometric and experimental methods is 0.38 Km/W and 0.37±0.02 Km/W for the U-bend heat exchanger placed in sand and 0.39 Km/W and 0.38±0.03 Km/W for the coaxial heat exchanger. This indicates that the BTR of prototype BHE designs can be estimated using their geometry before collecting experimental data. Of the two methods using experimental data, calculating BTR with only the average fluid temperature has more applicability to field experiments because it requires fewer temperature measurements.
The U-bend heat exchanger in graphite grout stored 5.3 MJ at the quickest rate with a storage time constant of 15 hours. The U-bend BHE in the sand and the coaxial heat exchanger both required more time to equilibrate, with storage time constants of 24 and 20 hours, even though they stored approximately the same amount of energy as the U-bend BHE in grout (4.7 and 4.0 MJ). The difference is attributable a higher specific storage capacity (about 12 W/mºC at peak) in the grouted U-bend heat exchanger than in the other two heat exchangers (about 3.5 W/mºC at peak) during the first 10 hours of heating, and a roughly similar specific storage capacity in all three for the remaining time. Results of numerical simulations further demonstrated that the beginning of heating or recovery is the most crucial period for BHE performance in small scale experiments, as there is limited boundary interaction.
The difference in performance between the three prototype designs is attributable to borehole filling and not pipe geometry. The coaxial pipe and U-bend heat exchanger used in the experiments had almost no difference in performance when their boreholes were both filled with sand. The U-bend heat exchanger in graphite grout outperformed the same geometry enveloped with less thermally conductive sand. Using the grout with a graphite admixture increases cost, but reduces BTR by 84% compared to a heat exchanger with no grout. The U-bend in graphite grout was chosen for use in experiments at higher temperatures
A Review on Treatment, Prevention, and Research of Worldwide Parasitic Disease: Toxoplasmosis
Get PDFToxoplasmosis is a worldwide, yet often overlooked, parasitic disease caused by the protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii. The parasite is capable of infecting humans and almost all warm-blooded vertebrates. Over a million people are infected in the United States with toxoplasmosis each year. Most infections are asymptomatic but severe cases can lead to vision impairment, neurological disorders, and congenital birth defects. T. gondii is transmitted through undercooked meat, infected feline feces, or contaminated water and soil. The burden of T. gondii infection is most notable in livestock, felines, and immunocompromised humans. Despite being a widespread disease, toxoplasmosis is neglected in research and education. There is currently no vaccine to treat the infection in humans, but there are existing veterinary vaccines in various stages of testing and usage. Current treatment options include a few parasitic medications, such as pyrimethamine and sulfadiazine. These medications come with side effects, high price tags, and the inability to treat the latent stage of toxoplasmosis infection. Toxoplasma is a complex parasite with the ability to persist in the environment for many weeks to months and evade the host\u27s immune response. More research, funding, and public awareness are needed to make strides toward treatment options, effective prevention, and disease reduction. Novel and creative approaches are needed to address the parasite’s complexity and socioeconomic impact. Toxoplasmosis will be a difficult disease to tackle, but there is a promising future for vaccination and treatment efforts to reduce the burden of this disease
Thymosin Beta-4: A Novel Treatment for Acanthamoeba Keratitis
Get PDFAcanthamoeba keratitis (AK) is a severe corneal infection caused by the free-living amoeba, Acanthamoeba. Both stages of its life cycle (trophozoite and cyst) cause infection, primarily in contact lens wearers. It is often misdiagnosed, leading to delayed treatment and poor clinical outcomes. Current treatment options for AK rely on anti-amoebic agents that are toxic to corneal epithelial cells. Further, no single drug can eliminate both forms of the amoeba. Approximately 30% of all AK infections require a corneal transplant.
Thymosin beta-4 (Tβ4) is a G-actin binding protein synthesized in almost all human cells, including corneal epithelial cells. Tβ4 exhibits wound-healing and anti-inflammatory properties in the cornea. It has demonstrated efficacy in clinical trials as a topical treatment for corneal diseases, such as dry eye syndrome and neurotrophic keratopathy. This study assessed the potential of Tβ4 as a treatment for AK by evaluating its effects on Acanthamoeba-induced cytotoxicity in human corneal epithelial cells (HCE-S) and its impact on amebic stage conversion.
We observed that Tβ4 improved HCE-S cell viability in serum-free media when exposed to Acanthamoeba. This protection was not the result of increased proliferation of HCE-S cells nor the direct killing of Acanthamoeba trophozoites. Notably, Tβ4 did not protect HCE-S cells from Acanthamoeba-induced cytotoxicity in serum-supplemented media, suggesting that serum components may influence or mask Tβ4’s activity.
We also determined that Tβ4 inhibits encystation, but not excystation. We found that Tβ4 altered actin localization in trophozoites early in encystation. Overall, Tβ4 represents a potential non-toxic therapy for AK that warrants further investigation
Investigating the Influence of Animation and Conversational Virtual Agent Features on the Usability and User Experience of the Smartphone Mental Health Application “Airheart”
Get PDFRates of depression in college students have skyrocketed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting a need for effective, accessible mental health interventions. One potential intervention includes mental health (MHealth) apps. Virtual agents within MHealth apps may represent one way to provide human-like connection and therapeutic benefits. Despite the abundance of MHealth apps currently available for public use, few include virtual agents. Moreover, it is unclear which virtual agent features within mental health apps may be particularly beneficial in providing a positive user experience. The current study sought to evaluate how features of virtual agents, such as animation and conversation, impact the usability and user experience of a brief cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based MHealth app. The study also aimed to explore whether differences in these effects exist between users who are experiencing depressive symptoms and users who are not. College student participants were randomized to one of four conditions: conversational and animated virtual agent, conversational and non-animated virtual agent, animated and non-conversational virtual agent, or non-conversational and non-animated virtual agent. Over the course of two weeks, participants used the app daily, completing eight CBT-based modules; measures of users’ impressions of the virtual agents, working alliance, user experience, and usability were assessed at a two-week follow-up. Separate 2 (Virtual Agent Animation Feature: Present vs. Absent) X 2 (Virtual Agent Conversational Feature: Present vs. Absent) X 2 (Depressive vs. Non-Depressive) ANOVAs were conducted to evaluate user impressions of the virtual agent, working alliance, and user experience. Additionally, a separate 2 (Virtual Agent Animation Feature: Present vs. Absent) X 2 (Virtual Agent Conversational Feature: Present vs. Absent) ANOVA was conducted to measure the system usability. The results revealed that animation and conversation did not significantly enhance user impressions or user experience of the virtual agent overall. However, users who were experiencing depressive symptoms found the virtual agent to be less knowledgeable and less novel compared to users who were not experiencing depressive symptoms. Interestingly, users experiencing depressive symptoms only found the virtual agent to be less novel when the agent was conversational. Furthermore, the findings demonstrated that animation, but not conversation, significantly impacted users’ working alliance with the agent. Unexpectedly, users with animated virtual agents reported less shared tasks and goals with the virtual agent than those with non-animated virtual agents, suggesting that animation hindered the user-agent working alliance in this context. Although animation led to negative outcomes for working alliance, animated virtual agents were able to increase usability ratings for AirHeart, specifically the users’ perceptions of mHealth app ease of use and satisfaction, system information arrangement, usefulness, and the usability of the app overall
Novel Methods for Assessing and Prioritizing Road-Stream Crossings for Aquatic Organism Passage
No full textAnthropogenic barriers such as dams and culverts have led to riverine habitat fragmentation and decreased fish diversity worldwide. Low-head structures such as culverts are far more abundant than large dams and may have a larger cumulative impact on river connectivity. Many efforts to inventory road crossing barriers and prioritize removal and restoration efforts do not consider temporal variation in flow. We used cameras to gain continuous water level monitoring data to quantify the relationship between precipitation events and outlet drop height. In the spring of 2024, we selected 25 culvert sites in upstate South Carolina and set up cameras to take a photo every ten minutes at the outlet of all sites. Out of the 25 sites, we observed connection events at 15 sites. We observed between 1 and 16 unique connection events throughout the study period, and 10 culverts had no connection events. Due to limited resources and the high numbers of road-stream crossings, managers and researchers must rely on systems prioritizing evaluation efforts. We created an index that prioritizes watersheds for conducting road-stream crossing field surveys throughout the southeastern United States. The index considers watershed-scale levels of river network fragmentation, land cover, and native biodiversity. Each watershed was given a score between 0 (lowest priority) and 1 (highest priority). Of 25,290 watersheds, 3,389 were ranked low priority (a score below 0.5) and 8,711 high priority (a score above 0.7). A Conditional Inference Tree analysis indicated that native biodiversity was the highest driver of watershed priority