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Feeding Preferences and Potential Competition between Ariolimax columbianus and Arion rufus
No full textWithin the last 100 years, the arrival in the Pacific Northwest of the invasive European slug Arion rufus has introduced a potential competitor for the iconic banana slug Ariolimax columbianus, the second largest terrestrial slug in the world. We conducted transect studies in three habitats (cedar forest, Doug fir forest, and grasslands) on San Juan Island, WA, to examine the relative demographics of these slugs and note possible food sources. Utilizing those data, we conducted feeding preference studies across leaves from 16 local plant species, incorporating slugs from the two species from different source habitats, different size classes, and both the black and brown morphs of Arion rufus, which tend to specialize in different habitats. We used ImageJ to measure the area eaten from each leaf and calculated feeding rates. The feeding preferences of Ariolimax columbianus were consistent across size classes and source populations, and the two color morphs and various source populations of Arion rufus were also largely consistent within this species. While both species are generalists, they demonstrated feeding preferences that frequently overlapped, indicating that Ariolimax columbianus may compete with Arion rufus for food resources
History of maternal pregnancy characteristics, birth weight, and subclinical arterial disease in young adults in the Jerusalem Perinatal Study
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2014Introduction: There is mounting evidence that the intrauterine environment affects the risk of clinical cardiovascular health in the adult offspring. We studied subclinical disease mechanisms that may account, at least in part, for this association by examining the associations of birth weight (BW), pre-pregnancy BMI (ppBMI), and smoking during pregnancy with offspring measurements of subclinical arterial disease. Methods: Using the EndoPAT2000 device we measured the Augmentation Index (AI), a measurement of arterial stiffness, and the Reactive Hyperemia Index (RHI), a measurement of endothelial function, in 400 subjects from the Jerusalem Perinatal Family Follow-up Study (JPS-1). The JPS-1 includes data on maternal and pregnancy characteristics collected from an interview taken shortly after birth; weight, height, and BP measurements collected at age 17; and a detailed interview, and physical exam conducted at age 32. We repeated the models adjusting for offspring BMI at age 17 and age 32 and for other maternal and offspring lifestyle, socioeconomic, and demographic characteristics. Results: We found an inverse linear association between BW and AI (β=-0.439, 95% CI (-0.830,-0.048) for a 100g increase in BW) limited to females, that remained after adjustment for offspring obesity but was attenuated after adjustment for other maternal and offspring characteristics. We did not find an association between BW and RHI. We found an inverse ‘U’ shape association between ppBMI and RHI that remained after adjustment for maternal and offspring characteristics, including offspring obesity. For example, compared to a ppBMI of 19 kg/m2, a ppBMI of 24 kg/m2 was associated with a 0.14 higher mean offspring RHI (95% CI 0.004, 0.28), while compared to a ppBMI of 29 kg/m2, a ppBMI of 34 kg/m2 was associated with a 0.18 lower mean offspring RHI (95% CI -0.40, -0.002). We did not find an association between ppBMI and offspring AI. There was no evidence of an association between smoking during pregnancy and offspring arterial characteristics. Conclusion: Our findings contribute to the evidence that maternal ppBMI and offspring BW may affect offspring clinical cardiovascular health later in life, and suggest that the effect may be partly due to changes in offspring subclinical arterial characteristics
Essays on Household Behavior in Developing Economies
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2014This dissertation consists of three essays in development economics. I explore various household behaviors in developing economies, using India and Tanzania as examples. The first two chapters focus on urban slums to capture the inequality within cities and to evaluate the impact of an intervention during urbanization. The third chapter investigates the influence of an inheritance law reform on child labor. The first chapter, which is a joint work with Claus Portner, examines the differences in child health across rural, urban non-slum and slum areas. The developing world is rapidly becoming more and more urban, but our understanding of the differences between urban and rural areas is still limited, especially in the important area of child health and its determinants. Simple averages show clearly that child health in India is worst in rural areas and best in urban areas---with slums in between---but it is unclear exactly what accounts for these differences. We examine the determinants of these differences and to what extent the same mechanisms affect child health in different areas using the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) data from India. Once we control for environmental conditions and wealth status, the urban advantage in child health disappears and slum children fare substantially worse than their rural counterparts. We also examine the impact of maternal education on child health across rural, urban, and slum areas and find that the positive effect of mother's education on child health is significantly stronger in rural areas than in cities and almost entirely absent in slums. Potential explanations for these results, such as school quality and migration, are explored, but these are unlikely to fully explain the differences in health. The second chapter, which is a joint work with Aidan Coville, evaluates the impact of a slum upgrading project in Tanzania. Developing countries spend significant amounts of their budgets annually on slum upgrading activities, with the broad objectives of alleviating poverty, improving health and well-being and strengthening the social fabric within these communities in a holistic and integrated manner. Rigorous evidence on the impact of these programs is sparse. Isolating the causal impact of these interventions presents a challenge, since the outcomes of interest are often correlated with the site selection for upgrading, and randomized controlled trials are not usually feasible for practical implementation reasons. While rigorous research is beginning to emerge on the effects of slum upgrading on diarrhea, acute respiratory illness (ARI) and the crowding out of private investments, very little is known about the broader impacts of the upgrading process that serve to motivate these interventions in the first place. This paper evaluates the Community Infrastructure Upgrading Program (CIUP) financed by the World Bank with the aim of improving the lives of slum dwellers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania through targeted investments in community infrastructure such as roads, drainage systems and streetlights. We find that the CIUP interventions increased household sizes and decreased out-migration, halved diarrhea rates for children under 5, and increased female school enrollment rates, but did not have significant impacts on employment, business operations, income and expenditure, private investment or social cohesion. We review possible confounding factors that influence the reliability of these estimates and present the results in light of these methodological constraints. The third chapter examines the relationship between female autonomy and child labor in India. Many children in developing countries are engaged in various forms of child labor. It is important to understand the determinants of child labor and to evaluate its welfare implications. Intra-household bargaining has been considered an important factor in household decision-making for investment in children. This paper uses the Hindu Succession Act Amendment (HSAA) in India as a source of exogenous variation in woman's bargaining power and information from the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) to study the effect on child labor. I find that the increase in mothers' bargaining power is associated with a lower probability of child labor, and this negative impact is especially strong for teenage daughters. A daughter of 12 to 14 years old is less likely to be working by 30 percentage points and is less likely to do family work by 20.6 percentage points if her mother is exposed to the HSAA. The HSAA also shows differential impact on families with different sizes and wealth status
Genetically Engineered Solid Binding Peptides (GEPI) for Surface Biofunctionalization Applications: Immobilization of Enzymes and Antimicrobial Peptides on Solids
No full textThesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2014Biological activation and functionalization of solid material interfaces by functional integration of biomolecules is emerging as one of the most dynamic fields of research, impacting a diverse array of applications. Recent advances in translating the biomolecular mechanisms into the hybrid materials and systems design promise novel methodologies that may transform some of our engineering approaches. One of the key issues on design of such systems is the integration of bioactive molecules at the material interfaces without compromising their spatial distribution, surface organization and orientation-dependent bioactivity within a desired proximity. Here, we propose to demonstrate the effective utilization of specific solid binding peptides as anchoring molecules that can be further functionalized to create chimeric peptides. These chimeric molecules are engineered to have built-in solid binding surface binding property in addition to displayed biological functionality as shown by two different case studies. In case study I, we take the initial steps toward designing multifunctional, enzyme-based platforms by genetically integrating the engineered solid binding peptide tags for tethering redox enzymes onto electrode surfaces. Specifically, utilizing the gold binding peptide (AuBP2) as a molecular erector, we engineered a fusion protein that genetically conjugates to the formate dehydrogenase (FDH) enzyme. Following the binding kinetics and catalytic activity analysis of fusion protein, we created a circuit-based biosensor system and demonstrated the effectiveness of the fusion FDH enzyme electrode over multiple cycles by addition of formate as the substrate. In case study IIA and IIB, the capability of GEPI's on biomolecular surface functionalization was demonstrated. Here, titanium alloy and zirconium implant surfaces were coated with implant binding peptides which were conjugated to another peptide domain which was engineered with antimicrobial property, resulting a chimeric peptide compromising both solid binding (GEPI's) and antimicrobial (AMP) properties. The efficiency of chimeric/bifunctional peptides both in solution and on titanium surface was evaluated in vitro against common oral and orthopedic infectious organisms, S. mutans and S. epidermidis, respectively and a control organism E. coli. Our findings demonstrate the successful utilization of solid binding peptides as anchoring molecules to design engineered peptide-mediated self-integrated electrode systems and medical devices. The molecular recognition based self-organization of solid binding peptides can be extended to develop a wide range of application where they can be part of biosensing, energy harvesting, biomedical platforms build upon their utilization as biological building blocks combining different combinations of solid materials to large repertoire of biomolecules
The Climate of Newspaper Coverage: Communication of Climate Change Uncertainty in India
No full textThesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2014Scientists are more certain than ever that climate change is occurring and is an anthropogenic driven process; however, consensus and public understanding are lagging behind. While climate science is a highly uncertain field, groups of scientists like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are working to better communicate about the issue. By examining articles published before and after the first volume of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), this study looks to uncover how uncertainty is communicated in English-language Indian newspapers. Utilizing methods of content analysis, related newspaper articles were coded for communication of uncertainty, sources of information, and climate change impacts discussed. I find that IPCC is not the most widely used source of information about global climate change. Second, I find that the uncertainty language defined in the AR5 report is not frequently used in newspapers
Leisure & Practice: An Exploratory Study on the Impact of Leisurely Museum Visits on Museum Professionals
No full textThesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2014The purpose of this exploratory research study was to understand how museum professionals experience being a visitor in museums and how their experiences may or may not influence their museum practice. Findings from this study were intended to start conversations about how professionals conceive the museum experience and the assumptions they bring to it based on their personal museum-going experiences. As a qualifier to participate in this research study, participants needed to have a leisurely museum visit scheduled, be a current museum employee and have at least five years paid experience working in museums. Data were collected through a two-part web-based reflective questionnaire administered to 25 individuals. Findings revealed that participating museum professionals are a unique visitor group which had a hard time separating leisurely visits to museums from their professional practice; experiences in both environments were continually contributing to and shaping the way the other was understood. Participants were not fully aware of the bias they brought to their practice from their leisurely visits. Further, affirmative experiences during leisurely visits and through subsequent conversations regarding the leisurely visit appeared to be of great personal value to the sample in regards to their professional confidence. Participating museum professionals thought deeply and critically about their leisurely museum visits, and took these experiences with them into their practice. This analysis on how museum professionals leisurely visit museums, how their practice is impacting their visits and how their visits are impacting their work serves as a foundation for further conversations surrounding this phenomenon
Bridging the gap between fisheries genetics and management
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2014The work in this dissertation addresses a gap between fisheries management and population genetics. The first chapter uses landscape genetics to determine whether natural boundaries exist in the Pacific cod stock in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands (BSAI) region of Alaska. Results indicate that Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea Pacific cod constitute distinct populations, and that Samalga Pass appears to be a physical barrier between the two. Until 2012, Pacific cod in the BSAI was managed as a single stock, but since that time have been managed separately, partially owing to the results of this work. In the second chapter, a novel simulation framework is used to examine the range of migration possible between North Sea and Norwegian Skagerrak Atlantic cod, given the results of genetic studies. Chapter 3 is a management strategy evaluation to answer questions regarding the utility of genetics in management decisions, given the inherent error rate in genetic studies. This chapter is parameterized for Pacific cod in the BSAI to examine the costs and benefits of incorporating genetic results into the determination of management units when two distinct populations exist. In general, incorporating the results of genetic studies into management framework increases catches and decreases the risk of population depletion below management goals. The fourth chapter examines a range of management strategies for populations subject to isolation-by-distance stock structure, a common type of population structure in marine fisheries. When disproportionate fishing effort exists, splitting a single management area into two provides less risk of depletion in individual spatial areas. Further improvement can be achieved when areas of similar fishing pressure are managed together
Iterative Multistate Negative Design of protein folds
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 201
Leyes Crueles - Lugares Violentos: Mexican Women's Testimonios Along the Migration Journey
No full textThesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2014Women's stories of the immigration journey illustrate the high stakes of getting to the US in the first place. These show how national and transnational policies and consequential experiences of risk and vulnerability are strategically tied to particular places and peoples before, during and after the immigration journey. My work offers a bottom up approach in which hegemonic rules can be revealed and analysed critically; this work brings to light how experiences from the "other" are linked to particular national and transnational policies created in the name of US national "security." It shows broad forms of violence resultant from structures of inequality rooted in colonial power and contemporary neoliberal economy and policies. Testimonios from vulnerable migrants serve to uncover the hidden agendas and unfair detrimental consequences of these policies from people who experience multiple forms of vulnerability, even as they are constructed, in theory, as having `chosen' to migrate