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Building a Statewide Advocacy Network for Affordable Learning: Lessons from Georgia
Full text linkHow do you support a system-wide movement for affordable learning that lasts? In this session, we will take a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of the Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) advocacy network - from its roots in instructional design and library collaboration to its transformation into a robust, cross-campus alliance of Champions. You\u27ll learn how ALG leveraged librarians, faculty, instructional designers, and administrative support to drive meaningful change across 26 institutions. Whether you\u27re a librarian, faculty member, instructional designer, or administrator, you\u27ll walk away with practical tips and strategies to build a similar statewide or system-wide advocacy team
Modeling Flood Risks for Small-Scale Coastal Watershed Across Shared Socioeconomic Pathway Scenarios
No full textCoastal flooding, driven by the mixture of natural processes and human activities such as precipitation, waves, sea level rise, and urbanization, remains a growing concern. While recent flood-risk studies use IPCC\u27s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways with climate projections to assess future flood exposure, smaller coastal watersheds, \u3c 120,000 acres, remain insufficiently studied. Projected sea level rise is expected to intensify these impacts in smaller systems, potentially causing more severe flooding than reported for larger watersheds. To address this gap, this study used the SRH-2D model integrated with Aquaveo\u27s Surface-water Modeling System to simulate flooding in the lower Fish River basin, Alabama. A coastal watershed sensitive to both riverine and tidal influences. Simulations tested different sea levels based on SSP scenarios corresponding to low, moderate, and high emissions for the years 2050 and 2100. Results indicate that the midcentury scenarios remained even in inundation extent and volume, between 9.9-10.4% compared to the 2020 baseline, the latter scenarios had a wider range in results of between 25.9-50.3% compared to the same baseline. Across scenarios, the most vulnerable and inundated areas of the smaller coastal watershed were the narrow points where upstream flow convene with downstream backwater. These findings highlight the need for futuristic location-specific flood mitigation strategies
Connecting the Dots with ORCiD
No full textThis session will shares the benefits of having an ORCiD, and why as an academic, researcher, and scholar, having an ORCiD in place is a scholarly communication best practice. Leave the session with your own ORCiD ready to go
Public Opinion and Judicial Decision-making: A Relationship Explored Through Interviews with Local, State and Federal Judges within Mobile County, Alabama
No full textCivilians and legal scholars alike often speculate how judges rule and what contributes to their decision-making. Acknowledging this conundrum and combining it with my own interests in the legal field, I attempt to explore how some judges located within Mobile County perceive public opinion and what factors direct their rulings over their respective case dockets. Through seven, semi-structured interviews, I ask each judge a series of questions regarding their backgrounds, decision-making methodologies, thoughts on public opinion relevancy, and application of their approaches to their judgeships. Analysis of the interviewees’ responses reveals data that suggests the judges have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with public opinion. While most judges denied public opinion influencing their decision-making, all judges indicated that maintaining public confidence represents an important element of their profession. However, determining factors the group unanimously turns toward are the legal facts and arguments presented within a case. Though, depending on the specific court procedure and allowance of the law in question, the judges may consider a party’s nonlegal circumstances. Future research should explore interview-styled studies with judicial leaders to glean more information on this or other topics, especially within other regions in or outside the U.S
The Search for Slow Particles and Magnetic Monopoles with NOvA
Full text linkSingular magnetic poles, north or south, have been theorized to exist for hundreds of years. In the modern day, the elusive singular magnetic pole still remains undiscovered. The appearance of this particle would help confirm many Grand Unified Theories, GUTs, and revolutionize our understanding of some of the fundamental forces of the universe. Fermilab\u27s NOvA collaboration is working on ways to screen and detect magnetic monopoles and other slow-moving particles coming from outer space alongside their main mission to study neutrinos. The aim of this work is to determine and improve the Far Detector’s efficiency at identifying slow moving particles. It was determined that using a slicer time window of 25 μs and an energy cut of 100 ADC units is optimal for extending the detectable range of slow-moving Monte Carlo simulated magnetic monopoles from a lower end of β = 3 × 10−4 to β = 2 × 10−4 with an improvement or no sacrifice to efficiency. With some sacrifice and change to these settings, simulated particles as slow as β = 5 × 10−5 can be detected.https://jagworks.southalabama.edu/honors_college_posters/1033/thumbnail.jp
Influence of Hearing Loss on Self-reported Hearing Ability and Listening Fatigue in Persons with Aphasia
Full text linkAphasia is an acquired disorder, often caused by stroke, that results in language deficits. It can greatly impact a person\u27s ability to communicate with others. Cognitive deficits may accompany aphasia. Additionally, hearing loss is a disability likely to co-occur with aphasia, as they both most commonly impact the same age group. When a person has hearing loss, the quality of the auditory signal is degraded when it reaches the brain. The poor signal quality, compounded with linguistic and possible cognitive deficits that are associated with aphasia, makes it more difficult for persons with aphasia (PWA) to comprehend speech.
For all people, listening takes effort and attention. The Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL) model is an adaptation of Kahneman’s Capacity Model for Attention that helps explain the effort required to listen effectively. Increased effort depletes cognitive resources and leads to listening fatigue. Listening fatigue, when compounded with aphasia and hearing impairment, can exacerbate difficulties comprehending speech. This study examined self-reported listening ability and listening fatigue in people with aphasia and hearing loss
Unified Adaptive Cross-Attention Multimodal Network
Full text linkAccurately diagnosing appendicitis remains a significant challenge in emergency medicine due to its varied clinical presentation and overlap with other abdominal conditions. Existing diagnostic models often rely on unimodal data, such as computed tomography (CT) images or clinical notes, limiting their ability to capture the full complexity of patient information. This study proposes a novel multimodal framework, a Unified Adaptive Cross-Attention Multimodal Framework (u-ACM), that integrates CT images and clinical notes using hybrid fusion strategies to improve diagnostic accuracy for appendicitis. The u-ACM leverages adaptive contextual filtering to dynamically remove irrelevant features, crossattention mechanisms to align features between modalities, and a multi-level fusion approach that combines early, middle (cross-attention), and late fusion strategies. The integration of complementary information from both modalities will enable the model to achieve robust predictions by capturing both anatomical insights from CT images and contextual details from clinical notes. Additionally, the use of adaptive contextual filtering and cross-attention mechanisms is expected to improve feature alignment between modalities, leading to better multimodal representations. The u-ACM will be evaluated against unimodal baselines (image-only and text-only models) on a dataset comprising paired CT images and clinical notes and some existing methods like CARZero. The results will hopefully demonstrate that the u-ACM outperforms unimodal approaches and CARZero across all evaluation metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and area under the curve (AUC).
This study will make several contributions to the field of multimodal learning in medical diagnostics: (1) a novel multimodal framework for integrating heterogeneous data sources, (2) an adaptive approach for filtering irrelevant features before training, (3) a dynamic cross-attention mechanism for learning relationships between modalities, and (4) a multi-level fusion strategy that combines low-level, mid-level, and high-level features.https://jagworks.southalabama.edu/southalabama-shgrf-posters/1020/thumbnail.jp
API and FPGA-Based Methodology for Memory Chip Testing
No full textAs the complexity in memory chip architecture is increasing, it is essential to have efficient, reliable and adaptive test methodology to ensure memory’s performance, functionality and error detection. This research work presents a testing and verification method which integrates FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) and API (Application Programming Interfaces) to ensure automation and scalability in evaluating memory chip performance. The proposed methodology uses FPGA-based test environments to develop predefined and controlled test pattern, simulate real time memory operations and capture responses under different conditions. The APIs facilitate real-time and uninterrupted data communication between host side and FPGA test platform. API plays the key role to automate the testing procedure with diverse conditions by sending data from host side to FPGA and receiving data from FPGA testbed to host side. By integrating automation, real-time fault detection and modifying test algorithms, this procedure improves testing speed and efficiency compared to conventional testing methodologies. This study includes an analysis of FPGA configuration, automation through API and performance comparison, which reflects lower test time and precise fault detection. This result demonstrates how this testing framework offers a cost-effective, scalable and adaptable solution for modern memory chip validation.https://jagworks.southalabama.edu/southalabama-shgrf-posters/1009/thumbnail.jp
Ghosts in Glass: Ghost Crabs as Judges of Glass Sand for Coastal Restoration
Full text linkOver 60% of the Gulf of Mexico coastline is actively eroding, which has resulted in thousands of miles of lost coastline over the last 100 years. This drastic loss of coastal land highlights the dire need for coastal restoration across the entirety of the Gulf Coast. A vital aspect of restoring these eroded areas is replenishing eroded substrate, traditionally conducted through offshore dredging of substrates which comes with high economic and ecological costs. Recycled glass sand may be able to fill this role and reduce our reliance on dredging while lowering the amount of glass waste entering landfills each year. Our goal is to determine whether glass sand is a viable option for coastal restoration by testing the impact on a critical indicator organism in coastal dune ecosystems, the Atlantic Ghost Crab, Ocypode quadrata. Live caught ghost crabs from Dauphin Island, Alabama were reared in mesocosms containing full beach sand, half beach sand and half glass sand, and full glass sand for 8 weeks. To compare the effect of glass sand substrate on crab morphology and physiology, we measured carapace widths, mass, claw dimensions and crab mortality, crustacean hyperglycemic hormone at time of collection and after 8 weeks. We found no significant main effects of substrate and a weak effect of sex on crab mortality. We found no significant difference in carapace width or change in total mass across substrate, or sex. We found an 18.5% greater change in dominant claw volume in beach sand compared to glass sand substrate; however, we did not see any differences between sexes. Though final analysis of CHH levels is ongoing, we were able to confirm that commercial ELISA kits can reliably detect CHH levels in Atlantic Ghost Crabs and that those levels can be spiked for more sensitive testing. Overall, our growth and survival data indicate that ghost crabs had similar responses in glass sand and beach sand, suggesting that glass sand may be a viable option for large-scale restoration efforts both locally and globally