Improvements in fatigue and quality of life observed in primary and secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) patients adhering to a modified Paleolithic dietary intervention (MPDI), nutritional supplementation, exercise, and neuromuscular electrical stimulation regime are hypothesized to be due primarily to the effect of diet. However, no research has been conducted evaluating effects of the dietary intervention alone thus, the purpose of this research was to evaluate a MPDI in the treatment of Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis (RRMS). We tested effects of the MPDI in seventeen men and women (mean age: 36.3 ±4.7 years) with neurologist-verified RRMS. Nine subjects (one male) were randomized to a "usual care" (control) group and eight subjects (one male) were taught the MPDI. Both groups adhered to their assigned protocol for three months. Significant improvement was seen in Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS, p=0.03), Multiple Sclerosis Quality of Life-54 Physical Health (MSQOL-P, p=0.03), and Mental Health (MSQOL-M, p=0.02) scores from baseline in MPDI subjects compared to controls. Increased vitamin K serum levels (p=0.02) were also observed in MPDI subjects at three months compared to controls. Significantly reduced time to complete 9-Hole Peg Test (9-HPT) with the dominant hand (p=0.02) was also observed. Our results indicate trends for improved non-dominant 9-HPT (p=0.05), Metabolic Equivalent Tasks (METs, p=0.08), and 25-Foot Walk (25-FW, p=0.09) scores from baseline in MPDI subjects compared to controls. A Paleolithic diet may be useful in the treatment and management of MS, by reducing perceived fatigue, increasing mental and physical quality of life, increasing exercise capacity, and improving hand and leg function. The MPDI may also reduce inflammation as evidenced by increased vitamin K serum levels.

One of the leading causes of death and hospital stays in the United States, myocardial infarction (MI) occurs when coronary blockages lead to downstream ischemia in the myocardium. Following the MI, the heart activates a number of pathways to repair or remodel the infarcted zone. Endothelial cells respond to ischemia by de-differentiating to form neovasculature and myofibroblasts. The resident cardiac differentiable stem cells (CDCs) are recruited via local cytokines and chemokines to the infarct zone where they too differentiate into myofibroblasts. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) of the bone marrow respond to circulating factors by immobilizing to the heart and differentiating down cardiac lineages. In regenerative medicine approaches, these processes are exploited to augment the resident supply of reparative cells. Clinical trials to transplant cardiac stem cells into MI zones have been met with mixed results. When CDCs are harvested from autologous or type-matched donors, the cells are prepared with a minimum of manipulations, but the yield is quite small. Conversely, MSCs from bone marrow are highly proliferative, but the manipulations in culture required to trigger cardiac differentiation have been found to transform the cell into a more immunogenic phenotype. In addition, there is a dearth of in vivo evidence for the fate of transplanted cells. Currently, intracardiac echocardiographs are used to assess the infarcted area and to guide delivery of stem cell transplants. However, this modality is invasive, short-term, and does not image the transplanted cells directly. In this project, I addressed these shortcomings with a regenerative medicine and bioimaging approach. Our lab has developed multimodal nanoparticles based on a core of mesoporous silica, functionalized with fluorescein or tetramethylrhodamine isothiocyanate for visibility in fluorescent microscopy, Gd2O3 for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and trifluoropropyl moieties for ultrasound applications. After establishing in vitro models of cardiac stem cells using CDCs and MSCs, the particles were implemented and characterized in vitro. At a concentration of 125 μg/mL in culture, the particles are highly biocompatible, and labeled cells were found to be fluorescent, echogenic, and detectable with MRI in prepared agar phantoms. Ex vivo mouse hearts, first mounted in agar phantoms, then left in situ, were implemented as a model for guided delivery using ultrasound and follow-up cell tracking with MRI. These results in this project demonstrate the feasibility of this highly novel and practical approach. Additional studies will be carried out to evaluate the biocompatibility and retention versus clearance in live animal models, prior to the carrying out of true pre-clinical models for myocardial infarction.

Lung disease affects tens of millions of Americans, making it one of the most common medical conditions in the United States. Many of these lung diseases are classified as chronic airway disease. Because of this, it is important to be able to catch the development early so as to begin treatment as soon as possible to delay the progression and subsequently monitor that progression. One method of doing so is the use of quantitative computed tomography (CT). Study of the airway anatomy can be quantified using such measures as minor inner diameter (MinD), major inner diameter (MajD), wall thickness (WT), inner area (IA), and outer area (OA). Changes in these measures can then be tracked over time to determine how the airways are being affected by disease. The challenge with the desired longitudinal imaging is that prolonged radiation exposure can be dangerous to the patient. In order to make longitudinal imaging more feasible, it is important to determine what quantitative measures can reliably be made at different radiations doses so as to optimize radiation dose and quantitative assessment. Working to make this determination, three different radiation doses were tested to evaluate their quantitative outputs. A high dose (14.98 mGy), medium dose (6.00), and low dose (0.74 mGy) were used to image six different porcine subjects. Images were collected at these doses both while the lungs were in-vivo and once the lungs had been fixed and excised ex-vivo. All of the scans were then processed using APOLLO (VIDA Diagnostics). From the complete airway trees, quantitative measures were collected from thirty-five airways. For the whole lung analysis, the medium and low dose in-vivo scans and the high dose ex-vivo scans were compared to the high dose in-vivo scans to compare assess MinD, MajD, WT, IA, and OA. Then, in order to determine how well the CT measures represent the actual anatomy, a total of thirteen cube samples containing airways were segmented from one of the lungs (based on volume analysis of the lung pre- and post-fixation and visual inspection). The cubes were imaged in CT, for the purpose of aiding in the establishment of original location and studying the effect of a narrowed imaging window, and microscopic CT (μCT). Since μCT can have a resolution on the scale of microns, the values measured in these images were considered ground-truth. The CT and μCT cubes were then registered to the high dose ex-vivo scan so as to compare the cube values with the ex-vivo values from each of the three doses. The same five measures were collected and analyzed. The MinD, MajD, WT, IA, OA were statistically analyzed between the three in-vivo radiation dose scan sets, the high dose in- and ex-vivo scans, and the µCT cube, CT cube, and the three ex-vivo radiation dose sets. Preliminary results for the in-vivo scans show that the low dose and medium dose scans can reliably (< 5% error) be used to evaluate airways with minor diameters between 3.42 mm and 10.34 mm and major diameters between 3.98 mm and 12.06 mm. Comparison of the high-dose in-vivo and ex-vivo scans showed that the fixation and excision of the lungs did not significantly affect the ex-vivo lungs' ability to be used as a model for the in-vivo lungs. Finally, analysis of the various forms of the ex-vivo airways showed that there were few statistically significant differences between the datasets. These results support the use of using the low (0.74 mGy) radiation dose when studying airway disease affecting airways with minor diameters between 3.42 mm and 10.34 mm and major diameters between 3.98 mm and 12.06 mm. They also show that the quantitative measures from CT are representative of the true measures of the airways.

Deficits dominate our culture's narratives of homelessness, associating poverty with lower literacy and skewing social policies about access and equity in schools, jobs, healthcare, and community (Bomer, 2008; Miller, 2011; Miller, 2014; Moore, 2013). Scant, if any, literature exists about literacy and identity in homeless adults, in ways that they might enroll in college and/or seek long-term careers. Yet if one of our roles as educators is to advocate for justice and disrupt social apathy, then we ought to consider more studies identifying literacy strengths (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Bomer, 2008; Janks, 2010; Miller, 2011, 2014; Moore, 2013) of marginalized groups. In particular, studies examining literacy spaces where homeless adults come together to partake in the writing culture of their town can inform, if not disrupt, what literacies we privilege, and whose. What can we learn about writing and writers, reading and readers when we broaden the boundaries of access to the community? When we appropriate Bakhtin's notion of dialogic tools inside a co-constructed learning space? This dissertation is based on my four-year and ongoing ethnographic observation of, and participation in, the literate lives of 75 men and women in the Community Stories Writing Workshop (CSWW) at a homeless shelter house (SH), a writing group I founded in fall 2010 and for which I am the facilitator. I focus on ways in which members negotiate, through composition, the layers of deficits ascribed to them as youths in school and as adults in transience (Gee, 2012, 2013; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Holland & Lachicotte, 2007) within the physical and mental, social and personal spaces of the CSWW. Implicitly this overarching pursuit assumes that the CSWW is indeed a kind of third space co-constructed by its members, and as such, throughout my dissertation, and particularly in the "pre-profile," I illustrate the various cultural practices and literacies or knowledge funds (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2013; Moje, et al., 2004) that members exchange with one another (and potentially integrate) inside the CSWW. In the first, second, and third profiles, I look at how members position themselves inside this space, as well as how my dual roles as facilitator and researcher affect the practices of the group. I consider, too, the various group dynamics inside the CSWW and ways in which they function as audience for the writers. Questions I ask in this study include: How might the act and process of telling, writing, revising, and sharing nonfiction narratives inside the CSWW afford adults in homeless circumstances the physical and mental, the social and personal spaces to exercise what they know and to construct who they are as literate beings? What identities and literacies do members perform in their stories (e.g., drafts of narratives) and off the page, or outside of their stories relative to audience? How does audience--inside the CSWW and CSWW-sponsored spaces--support and disrupt these self-discoveries and/or enactments for CSWW members--as writers, readers, and literate beings? As my ongoing quest, I wonder how these identities might correlate with those of the narrator's in drafts and the transformative implications of writing.

The purpose of this dissertation study was to critically examine college student alcohol use in the context of the microenvironment of residence halls, the transition of the national minimum legal drinking age, and the attitudes and experiences of University of Iowa students who lived on campus from 1980 to 1995. The following research questions guided this study: 1) What were the attitudes and experiences of students living in the University of Iowa residence halls before, during, and after the change in the national minimum legal drinking age? 2) What were the individual experiences of students in the residence halls, in particular their alcohol behaviors? 3) What were students' attitudes towards policies and rules regarding alcohol? 4) How did non-residential students or staff members view student alcohol behaviors within the residence halls? 5) How might this information provide context and inform our understanding of the culture and environment we have on campus today? This study merged nested case study, historical methods, and oral history in order to address the research questions and best represent individual attitudes and experiences. Existing research on college student alcohol use and the influences of environment and peer groups, as well as the researcher's own background, informed and framed the study. Qualitative data sources for this study included nineteen participants, who were students, staff members, or administrators during the 1980s and 1990s. Guided interviews combined with artifact analysis were employed. Four over-arching themes emerged as a result of participants' attitudes and experiences provided during interviews: culture, residence halls, permissiveness, and sociability. Lessons learned include the importance of the culture and environment, the influence of residence halls norms, and the role of the university in shaping college student alcohol use. The national minimum legal drinking age transition seemed to affect few, if any, of my participants. My participants' attitudes and experiences during the time period of 1980 to 1995 did not depend on what year my participant was on campus in relation to the national minimum legal drinking age as all my participants faced similar experiences throughout the years of my study. The time period on campus was not as significant in shaping experiences as was the culture that had developed over time.

Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) is a recently discovered way of training Single Layer Feed-forward Neural Networks with an explicitly given solution, which exists because the input weights and biases are generated randomly and never change. The method in general achieves performance comparable to Error Back-Propagation, but the training time is up to 5 orders of magnitude smaller. Despite a random initialization, the regularization procedures explained in the thesis ensure consistently good results. While the general methodology of ELMs is well developed, the sheer speed of the method enables its un-typical usage for state-of-the-art techniques based on repetitive model re-training and re-evaluation. Three of such techniques are explained in the third chapter: a way of visualizing high-dimensional data onto a provided fixed set of visualization points, an approach for detecting samples in a dataset with incorrect labels (mistakenly assigned, mistyped or a low confidence), and a way of computing confidence intervals for ELM predictions. All three methods prove useful, and allow even more applications in the future. ELM method is a promising basis for dealing with Big Data, because it naturally deals with the problem of large data size. An adaptation of ELM to Big Data problems, and a corresponding toolbox (published and freely available) are described in chapter 4. An adaptation includes an iterative solution of ELM which satisfies a limited computer memory constraints and allows for a convenient parallelization. Other tools are GPU-accelerated computations and support for a convenient huge data storage format. The chapter also provides two real-world examples of dealing with Big Data using ELMs, which present other problems of Big Data such as veracity and velocity, and solutions to them in the particular problem context.

The occurrence of child sex abuse in the United States has long been considered a problem of paramount importance (e.g. Durkin, 2002; Howitt, 2008; Jenkins, 1998). Historically, the primary assumption was that the sexual solicitation of children occurred face-to-face. However, with the advent of communication technologies, people began to realize the internet's role in child solicitation. In an effort to combat this mode of child luring, a concerned citizen created P-J, an organization that seeks to identify and incriminate online predators (OPs). Members of this organization (PJMs) wait in online spaces for OPs to approach them. Then PJMs communicate as if they are minors to gather incriminating evidence against the OPs. PJMs and OPs have incompatible goals for their interactions. OPs' aim to foster a sexual relationship with a minor without being punished for it. PJMs' aim to gather enough evidence against OPs to convict them and prevent the future luring of children. To accomplish these goals, PJMs and OPs communicate with each other and face unique dilemmas in doing so. The current dissertation employs Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis (AIDA; Tracy, 1995), a theory-method package that helps identify strategies used by interactants to address their institutionally based communicative dilemmas, to answer the research questions: 1) How do PJMs communicatively address their dilemma of encouraging online predators to pursue sexual contact without entrapping or making OPs suspicious, and 2) How do OPs communicatively address their dilemma of seducing their targets without getting caught or scaring off the presumed minor? By doing so, the project expands extant knowledge of grooming and computer-mediated self-presentation. It also extends the use of AIDA to contexts beyond organizations and formal institutions. Through the sampling and constant comparison procedure of 40 PJM-OP instant messenger transcripts provided by the organization's website, the researcher identified four overarching categories of strategies that PJMs used to manage their dilemma: Target Presentation, OP Safety, Sexual/Relational Contribution Management, and Bust Facilitation. The researcher also identified five overarching categories of strategies for OPs: Identity Establishment, Relationship Management, Safety Precautions, Sexual Communication Engagement, and Meet Facilitation. Within these categories are many strategies PJMs and OPs utilized in an effort to address their dilemmas of attaining their goals while avoiding risks. By identifying the aforementioned strategies, the researcher satisfied her primary goal of recognizing and understanding how PJMs and OPs attempt to reach their respective goals while avoiding risks. In addition to fulfilling this primary goal, the results of this project entail implications for several different lines of research. Specifically, the results of this dissertation extend research on traditional and online grooming, self-presentation online, and AIDA. The results also provide practical implications concerning what adolescents should be wary of when communicating with unknown others online. Additionally, the study has the capacity to help PJMs become more aware of OPs' strategies as well as their own. This awareness could help PJMs more efficiently train new PJMs and gain a deeper understanding of their interactions.

Indoor air contaminants such as dust and gases are present in concentrations that may be hazardous to worker health in poultry production. Poultry dust may contain inflammatory agents (e.g., endotoxin) and inhalation exposure has been associated with pulmonary symptoms. The current control practice to reduce worker exposure to poultry dust is the use of respiratory protection (e.g., filtering face-piece respirators). Limited research has been conducted to evaluate engineering controls to reduce dust concentrations in broiler chicken production. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness of a water sprinkling system to reduce inhalable dust and ammonia concentrations in a broiler chicken house. Inhalable dust and ammonia concentrations were measured daily for the production cycle of a flock of broiler chickens (63 days). Inhalable dust was measured gravimetrically using an inhalable sampler and ammonia was measured by a direct reading sensor. Sampling was performed on a stationary mannequin inside two broiler chicken houses. One house used a sprinkler cooling system to deliver a water mist throughout the house and the second house was an untreated control. The sprinkler system activated 5 days after chicken placement and continued through day 63 of the broiler chicken production cycle. The following sprinkler activation program was used each hour from 6am to 10pm: days 5 – 9 five seconds, days 10 – 14 ten seconds, and days 15-63 for fifteen seconds. Geometric mean (GM) inhalable dust concentrations collected in the treatment house (5.2 mg/m3) were lower than those found in the control house (6.0 mg/m3). The GM ammonia concentration within the treatment house was higher at 10.6 ppm (GSD: 1.80), compared to the control house (GM 9.51 ppm; GSD: 1.77). However, the observed differences were not statistically significant (p = 0.33 and p = 0.34, respectively). Concentrations of inhalable dust were reduced by 11β when using the water sprinkling system, however the reduction was not statistically significant. The observed reduction in dust concentration was not sufficient to eliminate the need for respiratory protection.

Students with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) struggle with writing. Writing is an important skill for everyday life; therefore, it is essential that students with ID receive effective writing instruction. Explicit writing instruction adhering to the Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) has shown to be an effective writing strategy for postsecondary students with ID. However, the impact of simple sentence writing instruction has not been studied for this population. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of part I of the Proficiency in Sentence Writing Strategy (Sheldon & Schumaker, 1999). Results indicate that students were able to learn and apply the vocabulary concepts needed to use the strategy (ES = 0.808), but that the simple sentence writing intervention had no effect on students overall writing quality.

In order to reduce flooding, communities often try to control runoff with a storm sewer network, detention basins, low impact developments, and upstream storage to reduce stream overflow. Numerical models can help predict the effect these strategies will have before expensive construction projects are underway. A coupled 1D/2D hydraulic model using XPSWMM was created for the town of Kalona, IA, to test different strategies for flood reduction. XPSWMM utilizes one dimensional and two dimensional St. Venant equations to model flow in streams and pipes, or overland flow on the surface, respectively. The town of Kalona, upstream highlands, and the downstream floodplains were modeled utilizing a 4 meter cell-size unstructured grid. The model was neither calibrated nor validated, but its performance was comparable to a previously built MIKE 11/21 model of the same area when given the same inputs. The city drains into Salvesen Creek, the Central Drainage Ditch, and the East Drainage Ditch, with Salvesen Creek having the largest drainage area. 14 agricultural detention ponds upstream of the town were modeled to determine their effectiveness in reducing stream overflow, while modifications to the storm sewer network and in situ detention provided relief from local runoff. The detention ponds and modifications were modeled both separately and together and compared to a base model using the 10 year, 25 year, 50 year, 100 year, and 500 year, 3 hour storms. The different methods were compared using three index points: City Hall, Pleasant View Circle, and in a softball practice area. The upstream agricultural detention ponds provided a peak reduction of 2%, 13%, and 9%, respectively, while the in situ modifications reduced flooding by 0%, 44%, and 18%, respectively, for the 10 year storm. The combined techniques reduced flooding by 2%, 44%, and 20%, respectively. During the 100 year storm, the detention ponds, modifications, and combined techniques reduced peak flood depths by 17%, 24%, and 14%; 2%, 3%, and 22%; and 17%, 55%, and 23%, respectively. This demonstrated that the in situ modifications were more effective during low flood events while ponds were more effective at high flood events. The combined approach was most effective when the two methods complemented each other. Future work might determine areas throughout the town where reduced flow and in situ modifications together would be most effective and design approaches to maximize flood reduction. Additional features to be modeled include pumps to increase capacity in the storm sewer network, levees, and supplementary drainage channels.