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The Neurobehavioral Consequences of Prenatal Opioid Exposure on the Play Behavior of Juvenile Rats
Full text linkPrenatal opioid exposure has increased as a consequence of both increased Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) and prescription use for treatment of pain and OUD. However, human studies on prenatal opioid exposure are complicated by several confounding variables and thus, use of an animal model can lessen these confounds. Illicit use of opioids produces fluctuating blood levels whereas prescribed use of opioids results in stabilized blood levels of opioids. Our first study sought to determine if different methods of opioid administration, resulting in differing blood levels of opioids, would impact social play, a developmentally important behavior that is modulated by the endogenous opioid system. Once daily injection of morphine provided intermittent opioid treatment and morphine pellet implantation provided continuous administration in pregnant rats. Play was measured in three age groups: PD 25, PD 35, and PD 45. The number of pups, as well as the amount of play, significantly increased with age, especially from PD25 and PD35. At PD 25, the number of pups that played was decreased in pups that were exposed continuously (pre and postnatally), but this effect was not seen for the number of occurrences of the play behaviors. There were also an increase in non-play behaviors by age, from PD25 to PD 35 and PD25 to PD45 but minimal effects of treatment on occurrences or number of non-play behaviors. The second study focused on continuous pre and postnatal exposure, due to the prolonged duration of the morphine pellet exposure. Pups were cross-fostered such that pups that were prenatally exposed to a drug-naïve dam were raised by a drug-exposed dam and vice versa. Two groups of pups implanted with pellets or sham implants were not cross-fostered. The results show that although there was no significant effect of treatment condition on the amount of play, the number of pups that played was significantly lower in the pups that received both pre and postnatal opioid exposure. There were no significant differences in non-play behavior in the second study. The results of these studies suggest that both pre and postnatal opioid exposure are more impactful than prenatal or postnatal exposure alone
American Becomings: Ontology as Critique in the Nineteenth Century
No full textAmerican Becomings argues that several major nineteenth-century American authors across the antebellum and postbellum United States turn to and enact modes of ontological thinking in their writing as a means of contesting, unsettling, and immanently transforming dominant cultural norms and sociopolitical doxa. The project advances the notion that ontology (the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence, its parts and their interrelations) constitutes not merely a scholastic and disinterested inquiry into the eternal and transcendent but, rather, a way of thinking about the power of difference and becoming that has distinctive social, historical, and political stakes. Additionally, the project offers the first sustained engagement with the relevance of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s ideas to American literature, effectively charting a prehistory in American literary thought of Bergson and Deleuze’s shared concept of the virtual
Self-Reported Audiological and Vestibular Symptoms Associated with Lyme Disease
Full text linkBackground:
Lyme disease, an infectious vector-borne illness, is carried by the deer tick, Ixodes scapularis, which harbor the spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi, affecting hundreds of thousands of people in the United States annually. Lyme disease has a multitude of clinical presentations and overlaps with other complex illnesses, making diagnosis and treatment a medical challenge. This distinct bacterium can migrate into any organ system through the mediums of soft tissue, the lymphatic system, and the circulatory system. Despite its prevalence and range in symptomatology, minimal research has been conducted to identify distinct audiological and vestibular symptoms associated with a Lyme disease diagnosis. Through the collection of a self-reported questionnaire with targeted questions, this study aims to investigate how Lyme and tick-borne infection correlate with audiological and vestibular manifestations.
Methods:
A literature review was conducted to identify particular audiometric and vestibular symptoms that were reported with a Lyme disease diagnosis. Five audiological symptoms were targeted for a comprehensive survey of Lyme disease patients: tinnitus, hearing difficulties, sound tolerance, dizziness/imbalance, and auditory processing. An online based questionnaire of 24 questions, following a Likert scale of reporting, was created incorporating these symptoms utilizing pre-existing validated surveys that had high internal consistency. Tinnitus, hearing difficulties, and sound tolerance questions were adapted from the Tinnitus and Hearing Survey (THS) (National Center for Rehabilitative Auditory Research, n.d.). Dizziness/imbalance questions were derived from the Pediatric Vestibular Symptom Questionnaire (Pavlou et al., 2016). Auditory processing questions were adapted from the Adult Auditory Performance Scale (AAPS) (Roup et al., 2021) which investigates six listening conditions named Quiet, Ideal, Noise, Multiple Inputs, Auditory Memory, and Auditory Attention. The survey also consisted of general demographic information as well as other factors that might contribute to survey answers: other co-infections, methods of diagnosis, current medications, and pre- and post-hearing aid use. Following the creation of the survey, it was distributed utilizing an online platform, Qualtrics. A total of 561 eligible participants (nine participants were eliminated due to not fulfilling inclusion criteria) ages 18 years of age and older completed the survey.
Results:
The majority of survey participants were female (87.3%), with a median age of 50 years old and the most prevalent age at symptom onset in the range of 35-44 years old (22.6%). Besides Lyme disease, Bartonella (62.2%) was the most prevalent disease. Survey respondents had the ability to select from a limited number of choices for the diagnostic methods and current medications and had the option to select “other” for responses that were not listed. The “other” classifications were selected for the most indicated diagnostic method (e.g. IGeneX) which encompasses blood tests such as ImmunoBlot, ELISA, Western Blot, Lyme dot-blot assay (LDA), Indirect Immunofluorescent Assay (IFA), and IgXSpot. Participants also selected the “other” responses for the medication category (61.4%), with “no current medications” and “Traditional Chinese Medicine” herbs being the most frequent responses. Auditory and vestibular symptoms were calculated by adding the cumulative percentages of the following categories: sometimes, most of the time, and all of the time. Regarding tinnitus, ~50% of respondents indicated tinnitus was affecting their sleep and concentration and acted as a significant distraction over the past week; 75% of participants indicated difficulty hearing in noisy environments and conversations, along with difficulty hearing soft voices. Regarding hyperacusis, ~80% indicated that at least one sound is too loud every day and that a group setting with 5-10 people is often too loud. Additionally, at least one prior episode of dizziness/imbalance and auditory processing symptoms were evaluated in Lyme patients, with 90% of subjects reporting imbalance; 69.1% reporting dizziness; ~80.2% reporting attention deficits and difficulty comprehending language and multi-step instructions; and ~60% reporting difficulty discerning similar sounding speech sounds.
Conclusions:
In summary, there is a high prevalence of self-reported audiological and vestibular symptoms with a confirmed Lyme disease diagnosis. These findings suggest that proper referral from medical professionals and adequate identification of diagnostic markers are crucial to optimizing treatment outcomes and quality of life for patients suffering from tick-borne infections with comorbid hearing loss. Although much has been explored, future research is still warranted to clearly identify other specialty organ systems and the associated symptoms that follow Lyme disease
The Language of Development: A Case Study Analysis of Climate Development in Central America
No full textThe purpose of this thesis is to better understand the impact of locally led development activities on local populations. The focus of this thesis is on climate mitigation and adaptation activities in Central America led by international donor organizations such as USAID. The research consists of an in-depth review of existing literature and analysis from the fields of environmental justice, political ecology, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous Studies. This is accompanied by a case study analysis of various development projects in Guatemala and Honduras, as well as auto-ethnographic observations. In addition, this thesis analyzes the power and impact of language and translation in facilitating and complicating locally led development activities. The implications of this argument challenge the idea of locally led development from a postcolonial lens, with a focus on the rights and representation of Indigenous communities
Beauty Comes with a Price: But How Much Is It Worth It
Full text linkThe global skincare market, valued at 104.24 billion dollars in the year 2022, is very heterogeneous, ranging from prestige brands to more drugstore types. Even when the same key ingredients are present, the latter often sells for much higher due to branding and packaging and the aura of prestige created. This capstone project entitled Beauty comes with a price: but how much is it worth? investigates if such higher costs are justified due to superior quality or are driven by non-functional factors. It systematically compared the high-end versus drugstore skincare products in categories like sunscreens, serums, and exfoliants with respect to ingredients\u27 effectiveness, pricing, and consumer perception. The project, using a dataset from Sephora and Ulta Beauty, visualized the prices and quality relationship in Tableau and pinned up ingredient overlaps. Findings are presented on a customized website as interactive visualizations for consumers to have insights transparently. The ultimate goal of this project is to give buyers data clarity with respect to the pricing of skincare, hence making informed decisions by considering cost-effective alternatives. Along the way, the project will demystify the mystique surrounding luxury skincare, challenging what beauty is truly worth in monetary terms, and answering whether the investment in high-end products is due to efficacy or market perception
The Flesh of the Facts : Toward a Feminist Holocaust Consciousness
No full textThis dissertation examines the political and intellectual dimensions of feminist approaches to Holocaust studies and memorialization projects as they developed between the 1970s and the 2000s, with a particular focus on the work and contributions of Joan Ringelheim. Given Ringelheim’s extensive career as a professor, researcher, and staff expert at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ringelheim’s various endeavors illuminate robust networks of scholars, survivors, feminist activists, and museum professionals who collaboratively pursued feminist inquiry. The project addresses the numerous controversies that surrounded feminist approaches, which many viewed as highly subversive. By recovering the controversies within which Ringelheim’s research unfolded, we are forced to reconsider both what was at stake in the rise of Holocaust consciousness in the United States and feminist scholars and activists’ roles in advancing an alternate form of that consciousness. Through an analysis of pro-, non-, and anti-feminist arguments and their evolution over time, “The Flesh of the Facts” provides insights into the changing terms of debate. To understand both the enthusiasm and hostility directed toward feminist inquiry, this dissertation historicizes Ringelheim’s efforts within contemporary contexts including American Jewish debates about the Jewish family, feminist debates about sexuality and women’s history, and greater public awareness about the Holocaust in the United States. As this dissertation demonstrates, the development of a feminist Holocaust consciousness led to numerous complicated questions about identity, including Jewish identity, women’s identity, and lesbian identity. As Ringelheim interrogated various historical categories of identity and worked to pluralize narratives of the Holocaust, her work called into question the ways group identification worked and how individuals drew lessons from the past for the present
Narrating Mother, Narrating Twenty-First Century America: On Choice, Refusal, and Relation
No full text“Narrating Mother, Narrating Twenty-First Century America: On Choice, Refusal, and Relation” poses a deceptively simple question––What is a mother?––and troubles its assumed answers. Situated in literary studies, at the intersection of life writing, narratology, and feminist and queer theory, this study maps the circulation of the mother figure in cultural and literary discourses to reveal how the maternal is deployed to differentially legitimate, query, or resist the contemporary conditions that are often referred to as those of racial neoliberalism. Racial neoliberalism articulates the historical logics and practices that create the state of life for people in America; these include the conditions of vast racial and sexual inequality, as well as a nearly non-existent social safety net, which together render parenting an experience of precarity and material insecurity for most Americans. Neoliberal ideology has at once become enmeshed with the choice-based rhetoric of mainstream feminism, producing a neoliberal feminist logic that induces women to perfect and optimize their life decisions, including those that arise through parenting. Against this economic and discursive context, I read life writing in various genres–– including memoir, parenting guides, personal essays, autofiction, and oral history––to illustrate twenty-first-century literary experiments in content and form that challenge our received assumptions of who mothers are and what mothering is. The literary and narrative production of Black, avant garde, queer and trans authors points us toward a mode of being and relating that resists the hyper-individualized and meritocratic values of neoliberal family life. These texts generate a pedagogy that elucidates social forms that revalue care and kinship-making. Theirs is a genre of narration that teaches us how to desire collective forms of relationality, engendering an “after Mother,” following Sylvia Wynter’s “after Man.”
Each chapter successively illuminates the deployment of the mother figure in ways that engender dominant ideologies of the privatized family or, alternatively, challenge naturalized conceptions of the domestic as a means to multiply the forms by which we give and receive care. The first chapter, “Parēns Economicus,” critically reads “ex-pat” and data-driven parenting guides to demonstrate how hegemonic representations of the mother manufacture a belief in hyper-individualized entrepreneurship and meritocracy as moral goods. The second chapter, “The Not Not Mother,” illustrates how Sheila Heti’s autofictive novel Motherhood (2018) creates a pathway through the affective burdens of choice by expanding the horizon of possibility for women’s lives through, within, and against motherhood. “What If,” the third chapter, surveys the temporal and affective constraints placed on Black American maternal figures and contends that Soil (2023), Camille Dungy’s memoir of Black motherhood, writes towards a more expansive relationship to time, the family, and the natural world through the inextricably intertwined affects of grief and love. The last chapter, “Glorious and Abundant Somethings,” reads narratives of trans and ‘kidless’ care, including testimonies from the NYC Trans Oral History Project; Krys Malcolm Belc’s genre-bending memoir of transmasculine gestational parenthood The Natural Mother of the Child (2021); and Ross Gay’s prose poem “Throwing Children” (2023) to illustrate how these accounts embrace a relationality of opaque interpersonal recognition in which the boundaries of the family are porous, mothers need not have children, children need not have “mothers,” and all find that their need for care is met. Such texts model kinship-making in the direction of family abolitionist forms, modes that exceed the constraints of biology or property, and thus materialize life-affirming, relational ways of caretaking precious kin
Jamaica in the Olympics: The Rise of Usain Bolt
Full text linkThe Summer Olympics is a global competition that encourages athletes worldwide to participate in various events. For many countries, especially smaller ones, it allows gaining national recognition for themselves and their country. This project offers insight into how an athlete\u27s Olympic participation can impact their country and the event. Specifically, this project serves as intangible evidence that Jamaica has made an undeniable contribution to the sports world and its legacy by way of prominent athletes such as Usain Bolt. To that end, public Olympic data was analyzed and visualized in Tableau. The resulting visualizations are accessible through a website
Computability Theoretic Aspects of Profinite Groups and Models of Presburger Arithmetic
Full text linkProfinite groups, which are exactly the Galois groups, are all either finite or uncountable. However, all second countable profinite groups can be presented as the set of paths through a countable tree. We use these tree presentations to find upper bounds on the complexity of the existential theories of profinite groups, as well as to prove sharpness for these bounds. These complexity results enable us to distinguish the class of profinite groups that are isomorphic to a direct product of finite groups, for which we find an upper bound on the complexity of the entire first order theory. Additionally, given a profinite subgroup and a Turing ideal we define to be the set of elements in whose Turing degree lies in . We examine to what extent and under what conditions will be an elementary subgroup of . In particular, we construct a profinite group whose subgroup of computable elements is not elementary even for existential formulas.
A Presburger group is just a model of Presburger Arithmetic, which is the first order theory of the structure . We examine the possible degree spectra of these groups as well as the possible Scott ranks. The key to these results is the connection between linear orders, divisible ordered abelian groups and Presburger groups. We show how given a linear order , one can construct a divisible ordered abelian group and a Presburger group such that the degree spectra and Scott ranks of , and are all nearly the same
The Impact of Speech Rate and Target Word Intensity on Speech Processing and Listening Effort in Background Noise in Older Listeners
No full textBackground: Older listeners often have difficulty with speech perception, particularly in background noise This difficulty may be driven by numerous variables, including aging, age-related hearing loss, and a decline in higher-level cognitive processing. This difficulty with speech perception leads to the need for listeners to use a great deal of effort when listening to speech. The overall aim was to examine the effects of speech rate and target word intensity on speech perception (measured behaviorally), speech processing (measured using event-related potentials) and listening effort (measured using subjective questionnaires as well as a dual-task paradigm) in older adults and older adults with hearing loss.
Methods: Thirteen younger adults (mean age: 28.60 years, SD: 3.84) and 19 older adults (mean age: 67.28 years, SD: 4.92) participated. The younger participants had normal hearing sensitivity between 250 Hz and 8000 Hz. Three older participants had normal hearing sensitivity at all frequencies, whereas 16 older participants had normal hearing sensitivity up to 1000 Hz with a mild- to moderate-hearing loss in higher frequencies (2000, 4000, and 8000 Hz). All older participants passed the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) cognitive screening test. Conversations focused on three different topics (food, animals, locations) were presented at 65 dB SPL in a background of restaurant noise at 0 Signal-to Noise Ratio (SNR) for the baseline condition. Each conversation contained target words with high or low expectancy. A slow condition was presented using 50% time-expansion. An intensity enhanced condition was presented with higher increased target word intensity by 6 dB SPL. A dual-task paradigm was used to measure listening effort and perceived effort was evaluated using the NASA Task Load Index. Event-related potentials were recorded simultaneously with the dual-task paradigm and P3 and N400 were obtained.
Results: Analyses using linear mixed-effects models in the button-press task showed that the enhanced condition exhibited higher accuracy and faster response times for low-expectancy words compared to the slow condition and high-expectancy targets. However, the slow condition used in this study did not deliver the same benefits, exhibiting lower accuracy and longer response times for low-expectancy words compared to the enhanced condition. Regarding the NASA-Task Load Index, older adults reported requiring more listening effort compared to younger adults. Additonally, the slow condition demanded increased listening effort to recognize speech in background noise compared to the enhanced condition. In the ERP data, the negativity around 400 ms and the late positivity were more robust in younger adults in the enhanced condition than in older adults. Younger participants showed greater negativity for low-expectancy words in both slow and enhanced conditions compared to high-expectancy words, consistent with an N400 effect. In contrast, older adults demonstrated increased negativity around 400 ms for high-expectancy words in the slow condition. Within the older group, as age increased, responses between 300-500 ms were more increased in the slow condition. Additionally, as hearing loss increased, greater negativity for high-expectancy words was observed in the enhanced condition compared to the slow condition. In terms of latency, in the subtracted waves from low- to high-expectancy words, the younger group showed an earlier negativity peak latency (400-450ms) than the older group (550-600ms). However, the negativity peak latency did not show statistically significant difference across conditions within the older group. For the late positivity, the younger group exhibited a larger response in the enhanced condition compared to the older group. The late positivity for high-expectancy words was greater in the original condition compared to the slow and enhanced conditions, indicating that the enhancements did not improve late positivity for high-exxpectancy targets compared to the original condition. Within the older group, the effects of age and hearing loss were significant. As age increased, late positivity was larger for high-expectancy words in the enhanced condition compared to the slow condition. For low-expectancy words, late positivity was greatest in the original condition, followed by the slow and enhanced conditions, confirming that the enhanced condition did not increase late positivity for low-expectancy words. Similarly, as hearing loss increased, the late positivity increased for high-expectancy words in the enhanced condition compared to the slow condition, while it decreased in the original condition.
Conclusion: Increasing the intensity of target word improves speech perception and processing, particularly for low expectancy words; however, slowing the rate of speech does not confer the same benefits, at least for the stimuli used in this study. These objective findings were accompanied by perceived drops in listening effort in older adults and in the slow condition. Age and hearing loss were pivotal factors influencing speech perception, processing, and listening effort in both younger and older groups