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Dementia Incidence in Patients With Prurigo Nodularis: An Observational Retrospective Cohort Study
No full text[Introduction] Prurigo nodularis (PN) is a chronic neuroinflammatory dermatosis of unknown etiology characterized by severely pruritic, symmetrically-distributed nodules with a negative impact on quality of life [1]. While some consider PN a primary idiopathic disorder, it often arises as a secondary manifestation of underlying conditions, including atopic dermatitis (AD), chronic kidney disease (CKD), human-immunodeficiency-virus (HIV), and thyroid disorders [2]. Although patients with PN are at higher risk for psychiatric comorbidities including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation [3] research which investigates associations between PN and neurodegenerative disorders is limited [4]. Moreover, emerging evidence implicating sustained systemic inflammation, characteristic of psoriasis and AD, in the pathogenesis of dementias, particularly Alzheimer\u27s, underscores the necessity of investigating whether inflammatory skin conditions like PN similarly influence the development of dementia [5, 6]. We conducted a large-scale, retrospective-cohort-study to assess the relationship between PN and dementia
Utilizing Artificial Intelligence as a Strategic Risk Management Tool for Public Sector Operations and Auditing Processes
No full textSymbolizing a significant turning point in the historical landscape, AI is becoming an effective tool in today\u27s public administration, not only for increasing capacity, quality, and speed in services, but also for strategic risk management. Regulators and algorithmic auditing play a central role in implementing fairness, transparency, and persistent controls against risks in AI systems. Discussing modern applications of AI, such as anomaly-based fraud detection, resource estimation, and continuous auditing, and their respective strengths and weaknesses, this study concludes that AI significantly enhances efficiency and oversight but also poses the risk of enshrining bias, opacity, and accountability gaps. By considering AI as a dual-use technology that demands a proactive paradigm of accountability, the study demonstrates that AI has the potential to help build more resilient and responsible public sector systems
Aiding and Abetting Scientific Integrity in U.S. Federal Government Agencies
No full textScience can play a critical role in supporting sound public administration and policy decisions. However, the value that science provides to government decision-making is contingent on a government’s scientific integrity standards and the degree to which employees adhere to those standards when conducting, managing, using, or communicating about science. Within the U.S. federal government, scientific integrity standards have historically been defined and applied inconsistently, at times resulting in harmful government actions.
Since at least 2000, the U.S. Congress and several executive administrations have taken steps to strengthen scientific integrity in government operations. One recent step included requiring all federal government agencies to develop scientific integrity policies. However, it was unclear if the scientific integrity policy guidance disseminated to agencies—and the agency policies informed by that guidance—were consistent with extant literature on employee performance and policy compliance. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify the employee requirements articulated within extant literature that are potentially important or essential for enabling employees to comply with scientific integrity policies and adhere to scientific integrity standards; determine in what ways, if at all, U.S. federal government scientific integrity guidance and U.S. federal agency scientific integrity policies directly or indirectly addressed those requirements; and explain observed similarities and differences in the employee requirements addressed within the literature, government guidance, and agency policies.
An examination of extant literature resulted in the identification of 15 employee requirements for scientific integrity policy compliance. Content analysis was then used to analyze eight scientific integrity guidance documents and 24 agency scientific integrity policies against the requirements. The results demonstrated that guidance documents and agency policies only partially addressed the critical employee requirements identified through the literature, suggesting that extant literature was not leveraged to develop those documents. The results also revealed strong similarities between the government’s model scientific integrity policy and agency policies. The study’s results may be explained through the two communities theory, bounded rationality, bounded awareness, incrementalism, and neoinstitutional theory. Findings from the study may be used to inform strategic human resource management approaches for achieving employee compliance with scientific integrity and other organizational policies
Terrestrial and Lacustrine Organic Matter Biomolecular Transformations via Thermal Maturation and Oxidative Degradation
No full textThe most abundant source of fossil fuel-forming kerogen on Earth is classified as Type II kerogen, believed to originate from marine biomass. However, a significant amount of lacustrine and terrigenous carbon is transported to the ocean through fluvial discharge. Less than half of the exported organic carbon is observed in coastal regions and the open ocean. There is a great need for an explanation of what is happening to this organic carbon during transport and deposition. Traditionally, the marine organic matter in coastal regions accumulates to eventually be buried and transformed into petroleum over millions of years due to its overwhelming aliphatic character. One hypothesis is that most of the organic matter found in the oceans is comprised of terrigenous organic matter that has undergone oxidative transformations to appear marine-like in chemistry and petroleum-forming potential.
This Dissertation discusses novel processes to produce alternative hydrocarbon-based fuels from lacustrine algae and investigates the effect that oxidative degradation has on the elemental, isotopic, and molecular makeup of sediments found in oceanic abyssal depths that contain relatively high amounts of terrigenous organic matter. The first project describes a two-step hydrothermal liquefaction process to produce higher quality bio-oil from algal kerogen-precursor material called algaenan. The second project expands on this two-step strategy by utilizing an oxidative degradation process to achieve a similar algal intermediate residue that is then converted to a bio-oil. The third chapter focuses organic matter characterization of sediments from the highly terrigenous containing Congo fan system fed by the Congo River. The fourth project shows the effect that oxidation has on the anoxic distal sediments in the Congo fan, camouflaging them to appear marine-like and to potentially yielding a Type II source for petroleum during geologic maturation.
The results presented here aid in the search for methods of producing renewable energy sources and in the understanding of what happens to algal and terrigenous organic matter during and following transport and deposition in marine settings. This challenges current carbon cycle source determinations, potentially calling for a reexamination of global carbon cycle estimations and traditional kerogen classifications
Exploring Bonding Through Outdoor Recreation in Foster Care Utilizing Attachment Theory
No full textAs of 2024, there are over 328,000 children in foster care in the United States (AFCARS, 2024), many of whom experience disrupted attachments and trauma that hinder their ability to form healthy relationships. Drawing from attachment theory, this study explores how outdoor recreational activities can facilitate bonding between foster parents and their foster children. Using a mixed method approach this explorative research project consisted of two phases: a pilot study at the Virginia zoo involving foster families participating in a cooperative outdoor activity and completing post event surveys, and semi-structured interviews with foster parents to examine lived experiences of bonding and connection. Although phase one had a limited sample size (n=7), results showed outdoor recreation supports communication, trust, and shared enjoyment between caregivers and children. The interviews (n=8) in phase two revealed seven overarching themes: trust and communication, intentional and flexible parenting, quality time, everyday routines and traditions, child-centered bonding approaches, and the value of community support. Together these findings highlight that while outdoor experiences can strengthen caregiver-child relationships, successful bonding depends on individualized, consistent, and trauma-informed interactions
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Digital Life: A Study of Self- Disclosure and Work Environments
No full textThe digital age impacts individuals’ lives in many ways. One impact is how and where work is completed across many careers. The work-from-home strategy enables individuals to complete work that is not within a shared space, such as an office. With the absence of this shared space, communication practices within workplaces could be changing. Specifically, self-disclosure while working from home may differ from self-disclosure within the office or hybrid (both in office and remote) work environments. This thesis investigates whether there are differences in self-disclosure practices across three different types of contemporary work environments and offers a digital update to self-disclosure studies
Bridging the Gap Between Counselor Education and Trauma Treatment in Practice: A Phenomenology of Trauma-Specialized Counselors
No full textTrauma impacts the life experiences of a sizable portion of the population. Given that so many clients bring trauma into counseling, even when not the presenting issue, knowledge of trauma’s impact and proficiency with trauma treatment are essential topics in counselor education. This study gave voice to counselors in the field to share what they have found effective from working with clients with trauma. The researcher used a phenomenological approach and interviewed six self-identified trauma-specialized counselors who have practiced for five years or longer. The data was explicated, and four major themes were identified. The first theme was Inadequate Training: specifically, the gap between textbook knowledge and effective practice in the field. Second was the Complex Nature of Trauma in Practice. The third theme was the Physical Manifestations of Trauma. And the final theme that emerged was the importance of the Therapeutic Relationship and Counselor Role. A discussion of these themes with comparison to current literature inform implications for counselor educators, supervisors, and counselors in the field. Implications are offered to help bridge the gap between counselor education and trauma treatment in the field. These implications distil and distribute experiential knowledge of effective trauma counseling and help counselor educators expose students to field-based knowledge and best practices
On the Scalability of Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation on Distributed and Shared Memory Architectures for Numerical Approximations
No full textMesh generation is a critical component in numerical approximations of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). One such example includes Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), as CFD simulations in turn are crucial for applications in many industries, such as personalized healthcare and the design of aerospace vehicles. Generating high quality meshes for large-scale CFD problems presents a significant bottleneck in the CFD workflow. This dissertation proposes “fast,” parallel 3D mesh generation methodologies that are designed to leverage the concurrency offered by emerging High-Performance Computing (HPC) architectures. First, a distributed memory method is presented that integrates a sequential state-of-the-art isotropic, advancing front local reconnection-based mesh generation software. While outperforming its serial counterpart, lessons are presented regarding the challenges and feasibility of parallelizing such a software as a black box (i.e., a constrained functionality-first approach), motivating this dissertation’s second contribution of a scalability-first approach. It entails a distributed memory method for adaptive anisotropic mesh generation. This method resolves data dependencies and maintains mesh conformity while avoiding the use of collective communication techniques seen in some state-of-the-art HPC methods that are known to hinder potential performance. It also leverages a multicore cc-NUMA-based (shared memory) method. In order to efficiently utilize its speculative execution model, the shared memory method was re-designed (presenting several design abstractions based on additional lessons learned). The proposed method is shown to generate meshes of good quality with up to approximately 1 billion elements in about 3.5 hours when utilizing 512 CPU cores, compared to a state-of-the-art method that takes about 6 hours for the same case with the same resources. Finally, two techniques are proposed to help streamline the discretization of complex vascular geometries within the CFD modeling process. Given a 3D medical image, the first method approximates a user-defined sizing function, generating adaptive isotropic meshes of good quality and fidelity. The second integrates multiple software tools into a single pipeline to generate adaptive anisotropic meshes from segmented medical images. The shared memory method is again utilized within this pipeline, where it is shown to satisfy near real-time requirements given its newly optimized local reconnection algorithm and hierarchical load balancing model
Comparative Analysis of Emergent Behaviors of Three Drone Swarm System Models for Targeting Using Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation
No full textThis dissertation introduces a novel computational simulation framework for evaluating the emergent behaviors of three swarm drone models using Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS). The three swarm models are a Leader-Follower swarm model based on Bruckstein\u27s antline theory, a Flocking model based on a simplified Reynolds \u27Boids’ model, and a Stigmergic model with pheromone-based coordination. The primary objective of the simulation is to evaluate the performance of these models in delivering a user-defined number of drones of each type to a target area of interest in four separate scenarios, resulting in 50,000 separate simulation trials. Each scenario was structured to systematically assess how the swarm model\u27s performance responds to changes in agent-level parameters and external environmental factors. The simulation results reveal statistically significant differences among the models. Numerical analysis and visualization reveal the complex behaviors exhibited by each swarm model as it navigates an environment populated with randomly placed obstacles.
Additionally, the degree of adaptive behavior exhibited by each model is quantified using spatial and behavioral entropy calculations. This innovative use of entropy provides a quantitative means of characterizing emergent behavior and stability across swarm types. The Flocking swarm model achieved the highest success rate, displaying robustness across all threat levels, but was sensitive to a higher number of drones required for mission success. The Leader-Follower model was challenged in environments with higher threat densities but demonstrated improved success rates when higher drone counts are required for mission success. The simplified Stigmergic model performed poorly, with pheromone evaporation rate having minimal effect. By integrating statistical analysis and entropy-based metrics, this research provides a reusable ABMS framework for analyzing swarm performance, supporting scenario-based decision-making and system optimization. The findings advance the understanding of swarm behavior, contributing to the growing body of knowledge on swarm intelligence. The findings from this research also highlight practical pathways for designing and deploying drone swarm systems
Taming the Wicked Problem: Transparency, Civic Apathy, and the Challenge of Rebuilding Trust in Local Government
No full textSince the 1960s, the United States has experienced a persistent decline in public trust in government. The Founders believed that government could only function with the consent of the governed, making this erosion of trust a significant concern for democratic legitimacy. In response, many scholars and practitioners have championed transparency as a pillar of sound governance and a potential remedy for rebuilding trust. However, the solution may not be as simple as improving openness. Public officials increasingly recognize that transparency alone may have limited or even unintended consequences, especially when public participation is low or administrative resources are strained.
This dissertation explores the effectiveness of transparency initiatives, like Ohio’s Open Checkbook, through the lens of the Integrated Policy-Making Framework and Eckerd and Heidelberg’s (2020) research on how administrators perceive citizens. Employing a convergent mixed methods design, the study draws on statewide survey data from Ohio residents and semi-structured interviews with Ohio public administrators. Quantitative findings reveal that, in isolation, participation in Open Checkbook does not significantly increase public trust. However, when citizens are educated about the initiative, trust levels improve, suggesting that civic knowledge mediates the impact of transparency. Qualitative findings identify four key themes shaping decision-making. This research contributes to the field by demonstrating that transparency must be paired with civic education and meaningful public participation