This project brings together five editions of a relatively under-studied grimoire, the
"Enchiridion Leonis Papæ", and analyses them for the first time in an academic format. The analysis examines what little has been written about the "Enchiridion Leonis Papæ" as well as its legendary associations with Pope Leo III and...
In cooperation with the Center for Humanities and Social Change Berlin and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, we invite all scholars to contribute to this collection, seminar plans and syllabi which serve to pluralize teaching in the field of critical theory/s. The list of categories according to which...
The relationship between Internet use and social behavior remains unknown. However, research indicates that Internet use (IU) may have some causal role in certain types of psychopathology and overall functioning. In contrast, other work suggests that IU may be protective and buffer against social isolation. Poorer emotional processing (EP) is...
INTRODUCTION: Pyocele of the scrotum is a rare clinical entity not well-described in the pediatric liter-ature. With the exception of those patients who cannot undergo surgery, all published cases have beentreated definitely with surgical drainage with severe cases leading to orchiectomy.PRESENTATION OF CASE: A 12 day-old full-term boy with no...
Condyloma acuminata (CA) is a common sexually transmitted disease caused by Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) infection. CA of the bladder, however, is an exceedingly rare lesion. We present a rare case of poorly differentiated locally invasive squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) arising from recurrent CA of the bladder in an immunocompetent...
Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) secondary to neurologic disorders are well-established, but intracranial mass lesions are rare causes of LUTS with very few case reports described in the literature. We present a 28-year old man with urinary urgency, frequency and incontinence which were revealed to be secondary to a large...
In the age of digital technology, as teens seem to be constantly connected online, via social media, and through mobile applications, it is no surprise that they increasingly turn to digital media to answer their health questions. This study is the first of its kind to survey a large, nationally-representative...
The genetic variants underlying complex traits are often elusive even in powerful model organisms such as Caenorhabditis elegans with controlled genetic backgrounds and environmental conditions. Two major contributing factors are: (1) the lack of statistical power from measuring the phenotypes of small numbers of individuals, and (2) the use of...
Objective: To evaluate documentation of cardiovascular (CV) risk factors and obesity management by pediatric cardiologists. Study design: Review of medical records of obese (≥95th body mass index percentile) 2–17 year-old children presenting to outpatient pediatric cardiology over 1 year. Subjects were categorized as: heart disease (HD) with increased risk for...
Background: Current upper limb prostheses do not replace the active degrees-of-freedom distal to the elbow inherent to intact physiology. Limited evidence suggests that transradial prosthesis users demonstrate shoulder and trunk movements to compensate for these missing volitional degrees-of-freedom. The purpose of this study was to enhance understanding of the effects...
Background: Performance-based incentives (PBIs) have garnered global attention as a promising strategy to improve healthcare delivery to vulnerable populations. However, literature gaps in the context in which an intervention is implemented and how the PBIs were developed exist. Therefore, we (1) characterized the barriers and promoters to prevention of vertical...
Background: Parental characteristics that influence child physical activity (PA) behavior often co-occur. An analytic approach that considers these co-occurring patterns can help researchers better understand the overall context of parental influence. The study aims were to: (1) identify diverse patterns of the relationships among parental characteristics, (2) examine the influence...
Presented at the University of Western Ontario's "Digital Humanities Speaker Series" on October 16, 2013. An earlier version was presented at the Illinois Institute of Technology's "Digital Humanities Speaker Series" on September 11, 2013. Many thanks to Whitney Trettien, Heather Froehlich, David Golumbia, and Robin Camille Davis for reading and...
The following short talk—an initial thinking-through and provocation from my recent reading—was presented at HASTAC 2014 in Lima, Peru, as part of the “Political Platforms: Software, Social Justice, and Designing for Change” panel, which included Beatrice Choi, Anne Cong-Huyen, Amanda Philips, and Tara McPherson (discussant).
This short talk was a part of a panel, "Digital Literacy in the Classroom," organized by Ann Hanlon and Abigail Nye (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), and which included Harriett Green (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign), and myself, at the 2016 DLF Forum in Milwaukee, WI, on November 8, 2016.
Artificial spin ice lattices have emerged as model systems for studying magnetic frustration in recent years. Most work to date has looked at periodic artificial spin ice lattices. In this paper, we observe frustration effects in quasicrystal artificial spin ice lattices that lack translational symmetry and contain vertices with different...
We report on a diffusive analysis of the motion of flagellate protozoa species. These parasites are the etiological agents of neglected tropical diseases: leishmaniasis caused by Leishmania amazonensis and Leishmania braziliensis, African sleeping sickness caused by Trypanosoma brucei, and Chagas disease caused by Trypanosoma cruzi. By tracking the positions of...
The R package COPASutils provides a logical workflow for the reading, processing, and visualization of data obtained from the Union Biometrica Complex Object Parametric Analyzer and Sorter (COPAS) or the BioSorter large-particle flow cytometers. Data obtained from these powerful experimental platforms can be unwieldy, leading to difficulties in the ability...
Over the course of tumor growth, cancer cells interact with normal cells via processes that are difficult to understand by experiment alone. This challenge is particularly pronounced at early stages of tumor formation, when experimental observation is most limited. Eluci-dating such interactions could inform both understanding of cancer and clinical... and Tumor growth involves a dynamic interplay between cancer cells and host cells, which col-lectively form a tumor microenvironmental network that either suppresses or promotes tumor growth under different conditions. The transition from tumor suppression to tumor pro-motion is mediated by a tumor-induced shift in the local immune state, and despite...
EGFR and cMET cross-talk is involved in breast cancer (BC) progression and resistance to different targeted therapies, however little is known about the co-expression patterns of EGFR and cMET or its prognostic significance in BC. Protein levels of EGFR, cMET and their phosphorylated proteins were measured in 825 BC samples...
The mechanisms underlying the discovery of abstract rules like those found in natural language may be evolutionarily tuned to speech, according to previous research. When infants hear speech sounds, they can learn rules that govern their combination, but when they hear non-speech sounds such as sine-wave tones, they fail to...
What makes a musician? In this review, we discuss innate and experience-dependent factors that mold the musician brain in addition to presenting new data in children that indicate that some neural enhancements in musicians unfold with continued training over development. We begin by addressing effects of training on musical expertise,...
Recent studies in quantum biology suggest that quantum mechanics help us to explore quantum processes in biological system. Here, we demonstrate generation of photon pairs through spontaneous four-wave mixing process in naturally occurring fluorescent proteins. We develop a general empirical method for analyzing the relative strength of nonlinear optical interaction...
The endothelial cell (EC) lining of the pulmonary vascular system forms a semipermeable barrier between blood and the interstitium and regulates various critical biochemical functions. Collectively, it represents a prototypical biomechanical system, where the complex hierarchical architecture, from the molecular scale to the cellular and tissue level, has an intimate...
Impairments in the social use of language, or pragmatics, constitute a core characteris-tic of autism. Problems with pragmatic language have also been documented in fragile X syndrome (FXS), a monogenic condition that is the most common known genetic cause of autism. Evidence suggests that social cognitive ability, or theory of...
A randomized experiment was conducted to assess the effectiveness of three forms of e-mail appeals to prospective members of a newly formed professional group. The baseline condition consisted of an impersonal appeal; prospective members were sent a mass e-mail encouraging them to join. Participants in the personal condition received an...
Recent work using the eye movement monitoring technique has demonstrated that when people are engaged in thought they tend to disengage from the external world by blinking or fixating on an empty portion of the visual field, such as a blank wall, or out the window at the sky. This...
One of the most notable recent developments in survey research is the increased usage of online convenience samples
drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). While scholars have noted various social and political differences (e.g.,
age, partisanship) between MTurk and population-based samples, the breadth and depth of these variations remain unclear....
After large-scale disturbances such as fire, seeding can be necessary to reestablish a plant community and prevent soil erosion. While native plants are ideal for providing ecosystem services and supporting wildlife, currently seeded natives often fail to establish in disturbed landscapes. Further, reseeding with native plants is often hindered by...
Climate change, whether referring to historic ice ages or contemporary shifts in global climate patterns, has been linked to wide-ranging and regionally variable changes in biotic communities.
Understanding the factors that drive the maintenance of polymorphisms in plant populations has long been of interest to evolutionary biology. Variation in floral traits has often been attributed to selection by pollinators, but recent evidence suggests that other biotic and abiotic agents may also contribute to floral trait differentiation. In...
Because long-chain n-alkanes (n-C21 to n-C37) are found in the epicuticular leaf waxes of all vascular plants and are stable, long-lived molecules, the study of their molecular and isotopic compositions stands to serve as a potentially powerful tool in the fields of modern chemotaxonomy and paleoecology. This study attempts to...
Trees in urban areas offer ecosystem services like carbon sequestration, storm water attenuation, reduction of energy used in buildings and wildlife habitat. Cities invest substantial funds and resources to maintain a healthy urban forest, and much research has been done to improve its resiliency and sustainability. Studies have been done...
The prairie grasses Andropogon gerardii and Sorghastrum nutans have seeds with awns that twist in response to changes in humidity. The humidity-sensitive, or hygroscopic, part of the awn twists, moving the bent, passive portion in an arc. This trait has been demonstrated to improve seedling recruitment in other grass species...
Understanding how root traits vary within and among species, and how they respond to heterogeneous environments, can provide important insight into functional plant attributes that influence plant survival in competitive environments. Selecting plant material with root traits that will support its survival in competitive environments may help improve the outcomes...
Restoration managers may select seed from a variety sources for their restoration projects. If the purchased seed is not of the local ecotype, land managers run the risk of poor establishment in the short-term and outcrossing between local and non-local ecotypes, genetic swamping, and the loss of local genetic diversity...
Due to concerns about population declines and habitat destruction, secretive marsh birds (SMBs) are of high conservation concern at state, regional, and national levels. Gaps in research on SMB habitat pose barriers to conservation and wetland restoration efforts.
Fire is an agent of ecosystem change that has played a critical role in shaping the tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Periodic prescribed fire maintains the prairie by removing woody and invasive plant species, and stimulating growth of native herbaceous species. Fire’s beneficial effect on the tallgrass prairie aboveground community, in terms...
Once widespread throughout southern Wisconsin, Quercus savannas are now one of the most endangered communities due to fire suppression and increasing landscape fragmentation. These plant communities are also highly susceptible to invasions by nonnative, exotic species. Understanding the mechanisms of exotic species invasion has been the focus of numerous studies....
Hybridization is an important evolutionary pathway to genetic diversity, fitness, and ultimately to the emergence of new species. In contrast, hybridization between a native and an introduced species can lead to a loss of locally adapted gene complexes and ultimately to the extinction of the native. In the last decade,...
With increasing urbanization and creation of novel habitat types, green roofs can provide usable habitat for many species. To date, most research on green roofs has focused on minimizing the environmental impacts of buildings but little is known about the ecological services they provide. Previous research has shown that although...
Underutilized crops have the potential to economically benefit developing countries and to improve global food security. Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis, Moraceae) is one such crop that can provide essential nutrients and requires relatively low-energy input to maintain compared to major crops. Humans have selected for many cultivars of breadfruit since its...
The introduction of non-native pests in general, and invasive plants in particular, has been receiving increasing interest by scientists, environmental groups, and to a certain extent the general public. Deleterious effects from the release of such alien species include threats to the environment, national economies, and even human health. The...
Plant-aphid systems provide a valuable opportunity for studying the ecological consequences of land use change for interacting species. The North American tallgrass prairie has undergone severe reduction and fragmentation due to agricultural development. The prairie perennial Echinacea angustifolia, a model system for studying population-level effects of habitat fragmentation, hosts a...
The environmental and plant physiological correlates of plant growth and reproductive effort in the locally threatened orchid, Cypripedium candidum Muhl. ex Willd were examined in the context of a conceptual model of demographic and reproductive trade-offs, focusing on three Illinois populations. This study addresses the current status and long-term trends...
Nitrogen (N) deposition can alter belowground microbial communities, especially ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi, resulting in a reduced ability of associated trees to access organic nutrients. This study tested whether N addition decreases ECM species richness and shifts ECM species composition across spatial scales in a subtropical slash pine (Pinus elliottii) plantation...
The tallgrass prairie once dominated much of the mid-western United States. Today, this highly productive system has been severely reduced, contributing to an array of environmental problems. The recent renaissance in natural area restoration and stewardship of the tallgrass prairie in the Chicago Wilderness region (Illinois, USA), especially in the...