Faculty Publications Time to "get" religion? An analysis of religious literacy among journalism students Research shows the earlier students are exposed to a topic, the greater the potential for long-term knowledge gain. A survey (N=513) tested religious knowledge for journalism students and non-journalism students. Results indicate journalism students scored poorly on basic religious knowledge and in fact fared no better than non-journalism students. We argue that small changes in curriculum emphasis can help increase religious knowledge and improve job performance for journalists, who face an increasing diversity in both readership and news sources. View Item
Faculty Publications KVCG: A Heterogeneous Key-Value Store for Skewed Workloads We present KVCG, a novel heterogeneous key-value store whose primary objective is to serve client requests targeting frequently accessed (hot) keys at sub-millisecond latency and requests targeting less frequently accessed (cold) keys with high throughput. To accomplish this goal, KVCG deploys an architecture where requests on hot keys are routed to a software cache operated by CPU threads, while the remainder are offloaded to a data repository optimized for execution on modern GPU devices. Cold/hot partitioning is done at runtime through a model trained with the incoming workload. View Item
Faculty Publications How Are the Protestant Churches Responding 50+ Years After? Expanded Version for Christian Scholars Group View Item
Faculty Publications Greek Dispossession Staged, or When Street Politics Meets the Theater Staging politics is a process that can be understood in two distinct ways. First, it can refer to the act of bringing politics to the theater in the form of a political play. Second, it can imply the act of creating a spectacle of politics, which can include anything from a highly affective or rhetorical political speech to a theatrical street demonstration.2 In the case of bringing politics to the theater, the stage is a fixed location; in the second figuration, the stage is any place where political spectacle might publicly occur. View Item
Faculty Publications Suffering: Challenge to Faith, Challenge to God Presented at the International Symposium on the Works of Elie Wiesel as a Challenge for Religion and Society Today sponsored by the Rottenburg-Stuttgart Academy, Federal Republic of Germany in May 1995 View Item
Image Faculty Publications Foraging Dynamics and Entropy Production in a Simulated Proto-Cell All organisms depend on a supply of energetic resources to power behavior and the irreversible entropy-producing processes that sustain them. Dissipative structure theory has often been a source of inspiration for better understanding the thermodynamics of biology, yet real organisms are inordinately more complex than most laboratory systems. Here we report on a simulated chemical dissipative structure that operates as a proto cell. The simulated swimmer moves through a 1D environment collecting resources that drive a nonlinear reaction network interior to the swimmer. View Item
Image Faculty Publications ASA: Accelerating Sparse Accumulation in Column-wise SpGEMM Sparse linear algebra is an important kernel in many different applications. Among various sparse general matrix-matrix multiplication (SpGEMM) algorithms, Gustavson’s column-wise SpGEMM has good locality when reading input matrix and can be easily parallelized by distributing the computation of different columns of an output matrix to different processors. However, the sparse accumulation (SPA) step in column-wise SpGEMM, which merges partial sums from each of the multiplications by the row indices, is still a performance bottleneck. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Toward the Automated Detection of Light Echoes in Synoptic Surveys: Considerations on the Application of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Abstract View Item
Image Faculty Publications Chimeric forecasting: combining probabilistic predictions from computational models and human judgment AbstractForecasts of the trajectory of an infectious agent can help guide public health decision making. A traditional approach to forecasting fits a computational model to structured data and generates a predictive distribution. However, human judgment has access to the same data as computational models plus experience, intuition, and subjective data. We propose a chimeric ensemble—a combination of computational and human judgment forecasts—as a novel approach to predicting the trajectory of an infectious agent. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Vexed mutations promote degeneration of dopaminergic neurons through excessive activation of the innate immune response AbstractThe hallmark of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the loss of dopaminergic (DA) neurons in the brain. However, little is known about why DA neurons are selectively vulnerable to PD. We previously completed a screen identifying genes associated with the progressive degeneration of DA neurons. Here we describe the role of a previously uncharacterized gene, CG42339, in the loss of DA neurons using Drosophila Melanogaster. CG42339 mutants display a progressive loss of DA neurons and locomotor dysfunction, along with an accumulation of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) in the brain. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Three-Dimensional Turbulent Flow Characteristics Near the Leading Edge of a Longitudinal Structure in the Presence of an Inclined Channel Bank The present work investigates turbulent flow structures and behavior near the leading edge of a longitudinal flow obstruction in an open channel with an inclined bank. A volumetric particle image velocimetry (VPIV) was employed to collect velocity data. The results indicate that a relatively moderate channel bank angle (θ=28∘) does not prevent the formation of a junction vortex (JV) system. Indeed, it is found that the JV system develops over the channel bank and extends to the leading edge of the flow obstruction. View Item
Image Faculty Publications HBcompare: Classifying Ligand Binding Preferences with Hydrogen Bond Topology This paper presents HBcompare, a method that classifies protein structures according to ligand binding preference categories by analyzing hydrogen bond topology. HBcompare excludes other characteristics of protein structure so that, in the event of accurate classification, it can implicate the involvement of hydrogen bonds in selective binding. This approach contrasts from methods that represent many aspects of protein structure because holistic representations cannot associate classification with just one characteristic. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Convergence on reduced aggression through shared behavioral traits in multiple populations of Astyanax mexicanus Abstract Background View Item
Image Faculty Publications Neurocognitive analyses reveal that video game players exhibit enhanced implicit temporal processing AbstractWinning in action video games requires to predict timed events in order to react fast enough. In these games, repeated waiting for enemies may help to develop implicit (incidental) preparation mechanisms. We compared action video game players and non-video game players in a reaction time task involving both implicit time preparations and explicit (conscious) temporal attention cues. Participants were immersed in virtual reality and instructed to respond to a visual target appearing at variable delays after a warning signal. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Evolutionary rescue of phosphomannomutase deficiency in yeast models of human disease The most common cause of human congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG) are mutations in the phosphomannomutase gene PMM2, which affect protein N-linked glycosylation. The yeast gene SEC53 encodes a homolog of human PMM2. We evolved 384 populations of yeast harboring one of two human-disease-associated alleles, sec53-V238M and sec53-F126L, or wild-type SEC53. We find that after 1000 generations, most populations compensate for the slow-growth phenotype associated with the sec53 human-disease-associated alleles. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Analysis of the effects of simplifications on the state of loads in a centrifugal compressor AbstractThis study aims to quantify and assess qualitatively the impact of modeling simplifications used to represent inertial and aerodynamic loads on the stresses and structural deformations of a centrifugal compressor in operation. The research object is the compressor of the high-pressure line of the DGEN 380 bypass turbine engine. Based on the virtual dynamometer WESTT CS/BV, the gas-dynamic parameters at the entrance to the centrifugal compressor and after the stage are determined. These values were used as initial parameters for numerical flow analysis. View Item
Image Faculty Publications The Vasopressin 1a Receptor Antagonist SRX246 Reduces Aggressive Behavior in Huntington’s Disease SRX246, an orally available CNS penetrant vasopressin (VP) V1a receptor antagonist, was studied in Huntington’s disease (HD) patients with irritability and aggressive behavior in the exploratory phase 2 trial, Safety, Tolerability, and Activity of SRX246 in Irritable HD patients (STAIR). This was a dose-escalation study; subjects received final doses of 120 mg BID, 160 mg BID, or placebo. The compound was safe and well tolerated. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Continuous NPWT Regulates Fibrosis in Murine Diabetic Wound Healing Scarring is associated with significant morbidity. The mechanical signaling factor yes-associated protein (YAP) has been linked to Engrailed-1 (En1)-lineage positive fibroblasts (EPFs), a pro-scarring fibroblast lineage, establishing a connection between mechanotransduction and fibrosis. In this study, we investigate the impact of micromechanical forces exerted through negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) on the pathophysiology of fibrosis. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Metaphor and the Material Object in Moscow Conceptualism Discussions of conceptual art both East and West have focused on the notion of “dematerialization” of the artwork and the substitution of “art as idea” for concrete works of art. Yet such an approach oversimplifies the role of materiality in works of conceptual art generally and underestimates the transformative role of the concrete object in early Moscow conceptualism in particular. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Analysis of Protein-Protein Interactions for Intermolecular Bond Prediction Protein-protein interactions often involve a complex system of intermolecular interactions between residues and atoms at the binding site. A comprehensive exploration of these interactions can help reveal key residues involved in protein-protein recognition that are not obvious using other protein analysis techniques. This paper presents and extends DiffBond, a novel method for identifying and classifying intermolecular bonds while applying standard definitions of bonds in chemical literature to explain protein interactions. View Item
Image Faculty Publications A long-term travel delay measurement study based on multi-modal human mobility data AbstractUnderstanding human mobility is of great significance for sustainable transportation planning. Long-term travel delay change is a key metric to measure human mobility evolution in cities. However, it is challenging to quantify the long-term travel delay because it happens in different modalities, e.g., subway, taxi, bus, and personal cars, with implicated coupling. More importantly, the data for long-term multi-modal delay modeling is challenging to obtain in practice. View Item
Image Faculty Publications A unified Gaussian copula methodology for spatial regression analysis AbstractSpatially referenced data arise in many fields, including imaging, ecology, public health, and marketing. Although principled smoothing or interpolation is paramount for many practitioners, regression, too, can be an important (or even the only or most important) goal of a spatial analysis. When doing spatial regression it is crucial to accommodate spatial variation in the response variable that cannot be explained by the spatially patterned explanatory variables included in the model. View Item
Image Faculty Publications Projected topological branes AbstractNature harbors crystals of dimensionality (d) only up to three. Here we introduce the notion of projected topological branes (PTBs): Lower-dimensional branes embedded in higher-dimensional parent topological crystals, constructed via a geometric cut-and-project procedure on the Hilbert space of the parent lattice Hamiltonian. When such a brane is inclined at a rational or an irrational slope, either a new lattice periodicity or a quasicrystal emerges. The latter gives birth to topoquasicrystals within the landscape of PTBs. View Item
