Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This qualitative study explored the communication experiences of clinical educators who provide patient education on behalf of pharmaceutical company sponsors. It investigated how these educators navigate a medical encounter within the domain of three regulatory drivers—on-label compliance, fair-balance presentation, and adverse event reporting. The study used the ecological model of communication in medical encounters and the theory of Communication Privacy Management (CPM) as the lenses for interpreting the data. The main data were telephonic interviews with twenty-six clinical educators who delivered education services for pharmaceutical companies. Member checking, in the form of three post-interview focus groups, was also used. Seven themes emerged: (a) political/legal contexts factors greatly influenced clinical educators’ communication with patients; (b) the influence of factors within this contexts would frequently force educators to experience ethical dilemmas; (c) a new context, the disease and treatment context, emerged from the interviews as having significant influence in the conversation dynamics; (d) educators employed communication strategies to better navigate within the political/legal and disease and treatment context ecological factors; (e) educators believed they needed to establish and maintain trust throughout the engagement process for them to successfully solicit meaningful patient disclosures; (f) educators managed the information disclosed to them by patients using routinized rules as well as changing rules; and (g) educators managed multiple types of confidant roles with patients including stakeholder, deliberate, and reluctant. A main implication for this study is that educators feel ethically and morally bound to do whatever was necessary to avoid breaching the trust they established with patients. For some, this attitude prevailed over their obligation to deliver a compliant educational engagement. Hence, pharmaceutical companies need to recognize that for many of their clinical educators, the question of whether to be compliant is not a legal or policy matter. It is a moral and ethical issue. That being said, educators were also skilled at using communication strategies to navigate through the compliance and disease and treatment barriers that functioned as self-management barriers. Many of those skills often served to influence the way educators created privacy rules and managed privacy decisions related to their patient engagements.

The textile industry has grown significantly in recent years, reaching a global fiber production of 53 million tons which 12 % are recycled; Construction sector has been using more and more recycled materials from different industrial sources, to apply them in their constructions and to reduce CO2 emissions and final energy consumption. The present study aims to study the behavior of concrete blocks of fć= 210 kg/cm2 adding polyester textile waste with 3 %, 6 %, 9 %, 12 % and 15 %; void content, compressive strength and thermal conductivity decrease, and water absorption, acoustic insulation and unit price increase by 3 %, 34 % and 16 % compared to conventional concrete block.

MSc., Faculty of Science, University of Witwatersrand, 2011 / A multifactor ecological integrity index, focusing on freshwater ecosystems on a quaternary catchment scale, can be of great benefit to conservation planning. No ecological integrity index has previously been developed for South African quaternary catchments. In this study an index was developed based on three environmental surrogates: land cover, river integrity and fish species conservation status, with the intention of identifying quaternary catchments of highest conservation concern. By developing such an index, the aim was to provide a general indication of the degree to which catchments have been transformed from a natural environment to a human altered environment, thereby identifying catchments most in need of conservation. For the three available datasets, indices were developed using a five category point-scoring system. A score of one indicates a completely degraded environment and a score of five indicates a pristine environment. The original land cover data consisted of 49 different land cover types which were reduced to five land cover transformation scores. Available river integrity data already existed in five categories and a numerical score of one to five was applied to each category. Fish species conservation status was scored according to the IUCN red data list classifications on a similar basis. Subsequently, a weighted mean score expressed as a percentage was calculated for the three indices for each quaternary catchment. These indices indicate the degree of change/transformation from a natural system (100%) to a largely degraded system (20%). Ultimately, an ecological integrity index was calculated as a mean value of the three related but independent indices. However, the results of the developed ecological integrity index were not representative of real world conditions. This is largely attributed to the lack of complete data found in two out of the three datasets used in the study. Some of the main limitations encountered were the lack of river segment definitions within each catchment and the incomplete and un-systematic collected fish species data records. The land cover data, on the contrary, was of high definition and high standard. It is recommended that in the interim, the developed land transformation index, based on a detailed analysis of land cover, be used as an indicator index of ecological integrity of catchments

This thesis is a study of oral histories and literary records covering the professional development and works of Edward Blake Jr., ASLA, (1947-2010). The study considers Blake’s design principles via newly collected oral histories and a review of his literary record within the continuum of landscape architecture history from 1970 to 2010. Additionally, the study explores Blake’s position within the ecological design community to establish his status as a possible founding voice of ecologically focused landscape architecture practice in the Coastal Plains Region of the southeastern United States. The primary sources include a newly developed oral history collection with questionnaire-based interviews of Blake’s eight colleagues, professional mentors, and collaborators, along with various forms of project and process documentation generated by Edward Blake Jr. and his practice, known as The Landscape Studio. The study concludes with a distillation of Blake’s design principles, lexicon, and contribution to the field of landscape architecture.

Amplitude envelope is an important aspect of auditory perception. As one article included (Chapter 3) goes into great detail regarding this, it will not be discussed here. Included are two articles that explore the importance and influence of amplitude envelope in auditory perception research. The first article (Chapter 2) explores the role of amplitude envelope in an associative memory task, with the aim of improving the associability of auditory alarms in medical devices. Although we found no difference in performance based on amplitude envelope, the paper discusses the patterns of incorrect alarm identification and identifies potential sources of confusion. While this was not our initial goal, we feel this article is a valuable contribution that connects two distinct fields: music cognition and alarm design. The second article (Chapter 3) encompasses a meta-analysis, surveying the temporal structure of sounds used in auditory perception research, namely in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. This articles discusses several studies in which amplitude envelope has categorically influenced experimental outcomes and suggests that the standard ‘flat’ temporal structure (i.e. abrupt onset, period of sustain and abrupt offset) may not be the best way to evaluate the auditory system. The goal of this article is to determine what proportion of studies are using the standard ‘flat’ tones vs. other types of temporal structures we may encounter during everyday listening. These two articles collectively illustrate the original research I have completed on amplitude envelope during my Master’s Degree. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

In this research, study was made of representative soils of denton County (Texas) with the aim of correlating various soil-moisture factors through experimental analyses. Two accepted hypotheses of soil-moisture relations have been substantiated by experiment with Denton County soils.

The aim of this study has been to measure some of the ecological factors in a series of plant habitats and their relation to the existing vegetation in selected twenty soil types of Red River County, Texas.

Predicting crime trends via individual and community level-factors associated with crime is common across criminology, public health, and psychology. From social disorganization theory, crime rates are linked to neighborhood ecological characteristics that may shape the occurrence of illegal activities. Expanding this view, Shaw and McKay (1969) and Sampson (1993) emphasized the role of appropriate parental supervision and stable familial homes in reducing crime. Bursik and Grasmick (1993) further highlighted the influence of structural factors such as poverty and divorce. Social disorganization theory includes a discussion of systems within the social ecological model, three of which will be discussed. The micro system (immediate environment) involves factors like family. The mesosystem is where microsystems link, such as between family and community. Lastly, the exosystem (indirect environment) captures larger structures (e.g., economic influences) which help create the built environment comprised of the neighborhood and social services. These levels overlap and may provide information related to specific factors predictive of crime. Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) is a multi-dimensional concept that encapsulates physical, mental, emotional, and social functioning and has been used for risk factor identification (Yin, Njai, Barker, Siegel, & Liao, 2016). In the social ecological model, HRQOL exists in the micro (e.g., child abuse, intimate partner violence), meso (e.g., prenatal care), and exosystems (e.g., neighborhood poverty). For example, a host of research has discussed the contribution of neighborhood disadvantages to increased intimate partner violence rates (Miller-Graff & Graham Bermann, 2014), while other studies have found economic disadvantage and violent crime to negatively impact birthweight (Masi, Hawkley, Piotrowski, & Pickett, 2007). Although these factors, along with others like drug use and various health factors, have been linked to violent crime, the exploration of social ecological predictors for sexual crimes has been comparatively neglected. In a systematic review of risk factors for sexual crime perpetration, Tharp and colleagues (2014) examined 191 empirical studies and identified two societal and community factors (gender-based factors like female education level and environmental factors like homicide rates), 23 relationship factors, and 42 individual-level risk factors for sexual crime perpetration. To attain a better understanding of the potential range of predictors of sexual crime, the current study will utilize data extracted from two publicly available data bases. The first is the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations (TBI) database, which includes crime statistics for each of the 95 counties in Tennessee. Reported number of crimes against persons in 2018 will be examined in the current analysis with variables categorized as either sexual (n=7 offense categories) or violent, non-sexual (n=11 offense categories) crimes. Violent non-sexual crimes will be collapsed into one variable to serve as the comparison group. The second data base, County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, provides data on health factors contributing to quality of life. For all Tennessee counties, 11 community variables will be included. These factors were selected because they reach across the social ecological levels of micro (e.g., single-parent households, teen births, low birthweight), meso (e.g., substance use factors, health factors including mortality and insurance), and exosystems (e.g., children in poverty, disconnected youth). A multinomial logistical regression will be conducted to investigate whether specific community level factors predict the rate of sexual crime beyond the prediction of violent, non-sexual crime. The overall model significance will be examined by the collective effect of the community level predictors. A key factor in promoting community safety while simultaneously preventing sexual violence involves comprehensive strategies that stretch the range of social ecology. Less is known about predictors of sexual violence than those of other crimes. Further, more research has examined individual-level factors related to sexual crime perpetration. A more nuanced understanding of predictors of sexual violence at social ecological levels can assist in the development of more comprehensive prevention and intervention programs that target multiple levels of risk.

As climate change becomes a pressing concern for policymakers and citizens around the world, a variety of security discourses have emerged framing the environment as a security issue. While dominant frameworks focus on securing national interests, the international order, or individuals in vulnerable positions, the ecological security framework presents a radical alternative discourse. Ecological security requires a refocusing of the security discourse onto the environment itself, vulnerable communities, and future generations, and requires the exploration of alternative forms of social and economic organization. This framework has often been discounted as an impractical and radical alternative to dominant discourses, however, in this thesis I argue that ecological security can, and is, being enacted by local communities around the world. Similarly overlooked, yet highly relevant to ecological security, is anarchist political thought and methodology. I suggest that anarchist methodology, when employed by environmental activists through direct action, can enable the enactment of ecological security by local communities. By investigating the connections and overlap between blockadia activism, anarchist methodology, and Indigenous resurgence, it is possible to envision a locally-based, bottom-up model of ecological security. Through an investigation of the conflict between Wet’suwet’en land defenders and the Coastal GasLink pipeline, this blockadia-anarchist-ecological security nexus is drawn out and examined as a possible path forward for climate security. / Graduate

<p>Extensive bedding plane exposures in the Ludlowville shales along Cazenovia Creek Near Spring Brook, New York display the spatial distribution of the skeletal remains from a marine faunal assemblage. Fossils typically occur in aggregates that are subcircular in plan view and plano-convex in cross-section with the convex side down. A previous paleoecological study of the most abundant brachiopod, Ambocoelia umbonata (Conrad), (Bray, 1969) revealed that aggregations were in-situ 'life' associations rather than mechanical accumulations of shell debris. This conclusion suggested that fossil clusters represent short-lived ecological successions or seres and the present study was undertaken to examine the origin, development, and extinction of clusters .</p> <p>Three clusters, sampled in 10 x 10 x 0.5 cm blocks, were subjected to an exhaustive analysis. The absence of sedimentary structures, lack of internal lamination, minor amounts of silt-size quartz, pelleted thin section textures, numerous burrow traces and presence of 3 species of deposit feeding nuculanid bivalves strongly suggested a bioturbated, fluid substratum. Under these conditions fossil clusters were initiated by attaclunent of spat to scattered shell surfaces (i.e. trilobite carapaces, cephalopod shells and rooted crinoids). Successful growth of sessile invertebrates (largely brachiopods) produced continuous addition of surface area for future spat attaclunent and clusters expanded laterally while the soft bottom prevented vertical buildup faster than sedimentation rates. Fossil density distributions within samples indicated that several species had a patchy arrangement within clusters and that the dispersion pattern of two taxa, .Ambocoelia and Styliolina, altered during cluster development. Analysis of associations by presence-absence criteria revealed that specimens larger than 2 mm had few taxonomic associations near the base of clusters and many associations near the top. The number of associated taxa among specimens smaller than 0.75 mm remained constant, but there was a decrease in the number of shared associations by some taxa toward the top of clusters. Species-abundance distributions indicated no temporal change in diversity and the succession within clusters apparently did not proceed by colonization of different taxa at different times. The lack of bottom currents and the reduction of bioturbation in shell laden patches resulted in fecal concentration that created a substrate which was locally lethal. This ultimately caused failure of spat recruitment and clusters were terminated over a short period of time. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)