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Efficacy of Brilacidin against Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus
Get PDFThis thesis has been embargoed for 2 years. It will not be available until May 2023 at the earliest.Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEEV) is a positive-sense, single-stranded, enveloped-RNA alphavirus of the Togaviridae family that is transmitted through the bite of an Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquito species. There are no vaccines or therapeutic treatments available for VEEV, which exacerbates the need for better therapeutics. It is important to have therapeutics available that can inhibit viral replication and decrease the viral load early to stop the progression of neurological illness or damage and lessen the severity of other associated symptoms. Brilacidin is a potential antiviral drug that can be used to inhibit VEEV infection given its mechanistic ability to interfere with viral replication at the cell membrane. The efficacy of Brilacidin in VEEV will be evaluated through a series of experiments that will explore the dynamic of inhibition, safe testing concentrations, and its peak window of efficacy to gain a better understanding of the mechanistic impact on the host cell’s phospholipid bilayer in cell culture.2023-05-1
The Sound of Religious Architecture: Using Sikh Musical Traditions and Postmodern Technologies to Produce Space in Northern Virginia
Get PDFThis thesis explores kirtan as a musical practice that travels across a variety of geographically unbounded cultural landscapes (“-scapes”) with the aid of global social networks, postmodern transportation technologies, and technologies of space-time compression. The research employs the use of participant observation, participant interviews, literary analyses, and media analyses to determine how the kirtan brought to Fairfax Station (re)produces no fewer than three spatial identities associated with the gurdwara in Fairfax Station: a Sikh religious space, a Punjabi/Indian ethnic space, and a space of social (gender) (re)production. The author concludes with a discussion about how the kirtan practices (re)produced at the Sikh Foundation (and other gurdwaras) travels outward into new spaces, expanding the global Sikh religioscape and Punjabi/Indian ethnoscape, influencing the gender expectations and hierarchies that dominate those spaces, and informing the production of new educational spaces
Meditation and Interpersonal Timing
Get PDFThis study looked to measure whether meditation increases synchronization between two people. Subjects in the study were required to tap in time with a beat. When the beat came on, participants started to tap along with the beat on the space bar and continued to tap after the beat had gone. Results found that there was a statistically significant difference in synchrony between the two groups, however, the interaction effect was not significant. Therefore, synchrony increased in both groups, however the meditation group had slightly more of an increase in synchrony. Additionally, latency was statistically significant between the two, however was not statistically significant between the two groups. Therefore, further research is necessary to explore the interaction effect in synchrony, which may be completed with more participants
Quarter 4 2023
Get PDFThis issue of GEWEX Quarterly contains the articles on the following: a commentary on creating a shared vocabulary for the climate science community; an elevator pitch workshop and more offerings from H3S; looking at global inequalities in environmental research and balancing data-intensive and fundamental climate research with YESS; a tribute to Ehrhard Raschke, a founder of BALTEX, ISCCP, and BSRN, as well as an early SSG member; coupling human and Earth system models in E3SM-GCAM; the ARCSIX campaign to investigate the influences of radiation-cloud-aerosol-sea ice coupling in the Arctic climate system; a report from the GEWEX SSG-35 meeting held in Santiago, Chile; focusing on the importance of observations to assess model behavior, improving parameterizations, and understanding how land-atmosphere interactions are changing in a warming world during the 2023 GLASS Panel Meeting in Hohenheim, Germany; convection-permitting modeling for mountainous and high latitudes at the 7th Convection-Permitting Modeling Workshop; and the latest in land surface modeling trends, developments, and opportunities
Affinity Functionalized Strings for Blood Purification
No full textPathogen reduction is a proactive approach to maximize safety of blood transfusion. Methods of bacterial reduction are available for plasma and platelets but not for red blood cell concentrates and whole blood. We addressed this technology gap by using a novel approach consisting of molecular probes immobilized on nylon filaments (affinity networks) as a means to capture bacteria in suspension. We dyed nylon filaments with 24 dyes with different chemical properties, including acidic, basic, fast, metallic, hydrophobic, and uncharged/polar dyes. We established quality control measures of acceptable ranges of dye incorporation in the nylon network to ensure reproducibility. We performed incubations and microbiology cultures to assess the depletion capability of different affinity networks. Four affinity networks incorporating basic and hydrophobic dyes (pinacyanol chloride, reactive blue 21, sudan IV, alizarin cyanin) depleted more than 90% of E. coli suspended in phosphate buffer saline (PBS, 10 and 100 CFU/mL). Safranin O, methylene blue, alcian blue pyridine variant, and reactive blue 21 dyed nylon networks removed more than 90% of S. epidermidis from PBS (10 and 100 CFU/mL). In several instances, affinity networks removed all bacteria present in suspension. Affinity networks efficiently captured >90% S. epidermidis spiked in plasma at a 10 and 100 CFU/mL concentration, and the combination of sudan IV, alcian blue pyridine variant, and reactive blue 21 functionalized affinity networks had synergistic effects. Affinity network sequestration of lipoteichoic acid (LTA), a major component of gram-positive bacterium cell wall, spiked in model solutions, suggested that LTA is involved in the binding and capture of bacteria. In conclusion, affinity networks functionalized with synthetic dyes is a promising medium to capture bacteria from suspensions and from biological matrices for future application as a pathogen reduction technology. Future work will include a prototype production for a pathogen reduction device.This thesis has been embargoed for 5 years. It will not be available until December 2027 at the earliest
Sovereign Citizens: What One Extremist Group Can Teach Us About Democratic States and Sovereignty
Get PDFIn this research I employ an ethnographic approach to better understand the Sovereign Citizens Movement (SCM), which is an extremist group that originated in the United States. The SCM is founded on conspiracy theories that claim the US is a corporation, and that citizens can reclaim their sovereignty from the corporation, making them exempt from government regulations. I address two questions: first, why are people attracted to the SCM? and second what are the implications for modern liberal states when citizens reject the sovereignty of the state? I found that people join the SCM because it provides pseudo-legal strategies—strategies they believe to be legitimate, but that are not recognized by the US government—to help them flee the state authority. I then argue that SCM exists because of tensions in the social contract that modern liberal states are founded on—as such, resolving these problems involves reconsidering the social contract and highlights the importance of reimagining the future of sovereignty
STUDIES IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNISM AND POST-COMMUNISM
Get PDFThe transition of the former Soviet and Soviet Bloc countries from communism to market-oriented economies have had significant ramifications. Transition impacted the economic, social, and cultural conditions of millions across Europe and Asia, and gave rise to a rich stream of multi-disciplinary literature. In line with the literature, this dissertation investigates the influence of communist and post-communist institutions on people's perceptions of markets and examines the transition of Poland from communism to a market-based economy.Chapter one addresses the question of when and why are illicit markets regarded as morally legitimate. The chapter addresses this question in the context of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, where the moral legitimacy of commerce has waned since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I do so by analyzing the continued resiliency and robustness of illicit markets and their moral perception in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, where de facto private property rights have remained insecure in spite of de jure political and economic reform. Given the continuity of illicit markets across both periods, I argue twofold. First, what has remained constant in the moral nature of illicit markets across both periods has been the entrepreneurial drive to realize gains from trade by circumventing and evading a predatory state. Secondly, given this constancy in the form of illicit market exchange, I contend that changing moral attitudes toward commerce have resulted from the changing manifestation of illicit market exchange, in response to the predatory nature of the state. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet period, the state has remained a means to create monopoly privileges. However, whereas in the Soviet period, illicit markets served as a means to "grease the wheels" of commerce, economic transition in post-Soviet Russia corrupted the moral legitimacy of a market economy by transforming illicit markets into a means to "grease the palms" of government officials in the name of "privatization." Chapter two documents the results of the Polish experiment with socialism. I show that there was a wide chasm between the lofty goals of socialist ideology and the realities of socialism as experienced by the Polish people. The experiences of the Poles, like those of so many behind the Iron Curtain, demonstrate the value of economic freedom, the immiserating consequences of its denial, and the often-painful process of regaining lost freedoms. Moreover, Poland’s road to socialism teaches us something about the intellectual development of economic thinking. As I illustrate, the debate surrounding economic calculation in a socialist economy highlighted not only a fundamental flaw in socialist planning but also a critical feature that allows markets to work. Markets work because they permit economic decision-makers to engage in rational economic calculation. This calculation depends on the constellation of relative prices and the accounting of profits and losses that emerge from the free choices of individuals trading property rights. It allows us to sort out the economically viable projects from the technologically feasible ones. Without such a price system, these calculations are impossible, and this sorting does not occur. Resources are systematically wasted and inefficiencies in production and exchange abound. Chapter three illustrates that while Poland’s transition back from a socialist to a mixed economy was not without its own pain, it did unleash the extraordinary productive power of the Polish people, allowing their standard of living to rise at more than twice the rate of growth that prevailed during the socialist era. Poland attempted a radical pace of reform that came to be known as “shock therapy.” With shock therapy, reforms are implemented quickly and immediately, as opposed to gradually over time. In the case of Poland, several factors proved to be decisive in adopting a relatively fast pace of reform. First, there was an urgent need to arrest runaway inflation. Second, incomplete and sluggish reforms throughout the 1980s had led to the belief that policies must be implemented as a package and within a short timeframe so that changes in bureaucrats’ or the public’s whims cannot throw them off track. It was also hoped that shock therapy would improve the synergy between stabilization, liberalization, and institutional change. Perhaps the most important factor was the political capital of the reformers. The general public expressed strong support for economic and political transition after the collapse of the regime and waiting for another several years would have run the risk of eroding this support
Fear
No full textThis lecture provides a selective overview of recent scholarship on fear as it pertains to the history of emotions, and it suggests that a particularly fruitful way of conceptualising fear is to consider it instrumentally in relation to spaces of inclusion and exclusion. At the heart of this dynamic are often geopolitical anxieties. This lecture uses several case studies from the German-speaking world to illustrate this theme, and suggests that geopolitical anxieties can manifest in a number of ways: as cultural fears; fears of magic; and as strongly-rooted fears of societal implosion
Dynamic modeling for functional data
Get PDFThe first part of this thesis proposes a measure for heteroscedascity for functional data in the Hilbert space equipped with a particular inner product using a distance function on the kernel of the associated covariance function. This results in a closed form expression for the minimal distance of the observed functional data to the nearest homoscedasctic process. We develop an estimator for this measure which, under particular conditions on the observed data, converges to a zero mean normal distribution with a closed form variance if the hypothesis of homoscedascity holds. We propose bootstrap estimation to make the estimating the variance computationally tractable and investigate the accuracy and performance of the proposed methods on numerical simulations and a real data case study. This method is further extended theoretically to the cases of precise hypotheses of heteroscedascity and testing on surrogate variables. The second part of this thesis considers the variable selection problem in a functional logistic regression setting, the proposed methodology being adapting the group lasso penalty. The problem of low incidence rate it considered and handled using a bias reduced maximized incidence approach instead of the classic maximum likelihood estimator. Some theoretical results are established and block co-ordinate gradient descent algorithms are implemented to study the methodology in numerical simulations. As a result of these numerical simulations and the fact that the group lasso is not selection consistent, an adaptive group lasso is studied via numerical simulation for the functional logistic framework
SPATIAL DIMENSIONS OF MENTAL HEALTH AND THE MENTAL HEALTH CARE SYSTEM IN THE COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA
Get PDFThis dissertation addresses three research questions regarding geographic differences in inpatient psychiatric facility usage and mental health outcomes in Virginia. These research questions are: (1) What is the relationship between geographic access to both state operated and community based mental health services, state facility usage and population mental health outcomes or indicators? (2) How and where has psychiatric facility utilization across Virginia changed after implementation of 2013’s mental health care reforms and does the data support the policy having its desired impact? (3) Does social media content relate to facility usage and mental health outcomes, and if so, where?Much of the action on mental healthcare reform takes place within the medical and legal communities. This work showcases the benefits of geographic research methods to enhance the understanding of mental healthcare system in the state of Virginia. The spatial association between mental health care access, population factors and the rate of measured mental health outcomes such as inpatient hospitalization and suicide are examined in this research using spatial statistical methods, to include regression modeling, spatial autocorrelation analysis, and temporal comparisons. The changes in utilization patterns and increase in overall utilization of Virginia’s state operated mental hospitals following the enactment of VA SB260, which expanded access to state inpatient facilities, reveals which regions were most impacted by the law and indicates greater fulfillment of unmet needs for inpatient care reforms. The findings support calls to repeal IMD exclusion laws as regions with higher proportions of Medicaid eligible populations experienced the greatest increase in utilization. This study also examined social media content from Twitter to expand previous research into social media and health and determined that content from Twitter data feeds can improve suicide prediction model performance and provided useful indicators in the geographic differences in population mental health across the State of Virginia