JURSW Volume 5
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12588/71
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Item Ketonitriles as Intermediates for the Synthesis of Antiparasitic Drugs(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Dallmann, Alexandria; Narayan, Lauren; Rocha, Sarah; Zamarripa, Claudia; Glover, Johnny III; Vallor, Ana; Carvalho, PauloObjective: Synthesize b-ketonitriles as intermediates towards an effective drug to counteract the parasitic tropical disease leishmaniasis. Introduction: Diaminopyrimidines have been used as drugs against parasitic diseases like malaria, and less notably against leishmaniasis. Increased resistance, decreased efficacy, and severe side effects have been observed in the current treatment regimen highlighting the need for new drugs against those diseases. Methods: Six esters reacted with four different nitriles in the presence of potassium tert-butoxide using tetrahydrofuran as solvent to form b-ketonitriles. Results: Twenty-four b-ketonitriles were synthesized using a microwave reactor, with yields varying from 30 to 72%. Conclusion: Microwave conditions are appropriate for the synthesis of b-ketonitriles. Yields were variable, with starting materials containing amino groups resulting in lower yields of solid compounds of difficult purification.Item Adrienne Truscott’s Asking For It: A Theoretical Application of Mass Media Persuasion on Performance Art(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Swets, MeganAdrienne Truscott is a performance artist and comedienne whose performance Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her P*ssy And Little Else! satirizes rape culture and rape jokes. In this performance, Truscott does a standup routine while nude from the waist down, drinking alcohol, and surrounded by framed photos of politicians and celebrities who have condoned or committed sexual assault. Examining the communicative elements of this performance from within a framework of mass media persuasion reveals how Truscott’s techniques modify her audience’s attitudes about rape and rape culture. This framework is composed of Expectancy Violations Theory, the intersection of social activism and humor, and the Elaboration Likelihood Model, which are all related to how humor can persuade audiences. These applications demonstrate several elements of persuasion: Truscott improves audience perceptions of her message by disrupting their expectations; Truscott uses humor to reframe feminist issues of rape culture; and Truscott’s performance elicits peripheral processing to ease audience acceptance of her political messages. An understanding of how Truscott’s performance persuades her audience to change their attitudes about rape and rape culture informs how humor can and is used as a powerful technique for changing behaviors.Item Factors Related to the Gender Difference in Adaptive Guilt(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Kenemore, JordanGuilt is a self-conscious and moral emotion that involves feelings of regret and remorse over a negative behavior. Adaptive guilt, or guilt that focuses on specific transgressions, is important for strengthening and maintaining relationships, as it motivates the transgressor to engage in reparative action. Previous research has found that women tend to report more adaptive guilt than men do, but to date, the reason for this difference is not well understood. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to explore variables that have a logical association with adaptive guilt to determine which factors may help explain gender differences in this domain. Variables of interest included empathy and perspective-taking, which had a known association with adaptive guilt, and self-reflection, which correlates positively with empathy and perspective-taking but had an unexplored relationship with gender or adaptive guilt. The study tested the following hypotheses: (1) Women and individuals with higher levels of femininity would express higher levels of adaptive guilt, while those with higher levels of masculinity would express lower levels of adaptive guilt, (2) Individuals who express higher levels of empathy, perspective-taking, and self-reflection would express higher levels of adaptive guilt. (3) Women and individuals with higher levels of femininity would express higher levels of empathy, perspective-taking, and self-reflection. Participants were 367 students, enrolled in PSY 1013, “Introductory Psychology” who completed questionnaires that measured the variables of interest. Data were analyzed using correlational analyses and t-tests to determine which measures contributed to gender differences in guilt. As predicted, there were strong relationships between femininity, empathic concern, and perspective-taking, suggesting that socialization plays a stronger role in the development of adaptive guilt than biological gender. Additionally, stereotypic masculinity was found to be negatively correlated with adaptive guilt, personal distress, and rumination. Results also indicated a stronger social basis for the development of guilt, such that high-feminine individuals reported higher levels of guilt, perspective-taking, and self-reflection regardless of gender.Item The Importance of Location in Black Film(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Truesdale, Zachary EugeneItem Borderlands, Cultural Citizenship, and Mestizaje in Feminist Testimonio Narratives(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Perez, Arlette C.Item Chicano Identity and Alcoholism/Addiction Recovery in the Alamo City(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Hinojosa, MattItem Arachne According to Ovid and Dante: Challenging False Idols(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Harrell, Maxim PikeItem Demystifying Special Relativity; the K-Factor(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Harb, Angel DarleneThis paper targets upper-level high school students and incoming college freshmen who have been less exposed to Special Relativity (SR). The goal is to spark interest and eliminate any feelings of intimidation one might have about a topic brought forth by world genius Albert Einstein. For this purpose, we will introduce some ideas revolving around SR. Additionally, by deriving the relationship between the k-factor and relative velocity, we hope that students come to an appreciation for the impact of basic mathematical skills and the way these can be applied to quite complex models. Advanced readers can directly jump ahead to the section discussing the k-factor.Item The Ideological Foundation of the People’s Party of Texas(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Gray, GavinItem Cultural and Historical Views of Women in Ancient Mayan Civilization through Sculpture(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Ellis, DustyMy hypothesis is that most women were oppressed to a specific gender role in the Maya culture until Yohl Ik’nal became the first female ruler in their history; this event created a new culture of respect and acceptance for females in higher castes from then on. Women in the Mayan society prior to the reign of Yohl Ik’nal were viewed only as maternal and supportive symbols to the community; however, elite women were treated with a greater degree of respect but not quite as equals to the men until after her reign. Not only were these women only viewed as motherly and nurturing, but they were also placed into set gender roles that shifted based on their age. This is shown strongly through Mayan lore and deities. One, amongst several pieces of evidence regarding females being held in lower regard before the reign of Yohl Ik’nal, can be seen through the tale of the hero twins where one of the brothers loses his level of deference because he becomes a female in the afterlife. Another can be seen through Ix Chel who represented women throughout the stages of their lives; however, more often than not she was more closely associated with pregnancy, which shows how women were forced into a set gender role until after the crowning of Yohl Ik’nal, despite this particular goddess having a multitude of other godly gifts. There are very few exceptions to the role of women in society until Ixtab who is not as much of an anomaly as she may seem and is not completely out of the realm of female gender roles because she was created to serve men, which was how females were regarded before Yohl Ik’nal. The mythological aspects and folklore of a society helped to shape how this society interacted with one another within their community, which is how the Goddesses served to connote females as a weaker gender but was quickly disproven by Yohl Ik’nal which is shown through the later crowing of another female queen. It wasn’t until Yohl Ik’nal that the noble woman had the ability to gain respect because she defied previous standards that had been held over their heads since the beginning of civilization. Although Mayan women were gaining new found respect among their male peers, it was only for those who were fortunate to have been born into an elite position of the caste system; this is due to one not being able to marry outside of their caste, which means that one could not travel up in the hierarchy, leaving the change in society that Yohl Ik’nal set in motion only to this group. Yohl Ik’nal was the first liberator and rebel against the Mayan female gender roles set upon elite women, disproving the heavily connoted assumption of weakness in females, which created a new dynasty of respect for this subgroup of people in the Mayan society.Item An APOS Analysis of Student Learning of Congruence in Taxicab Geometry(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Barbosa, Jose SaulNon-Euclidean geometries are commonly used in the education of college geometry students to enhance their understanding of Euclidean geometry. Of these geometries, Taxicab geometry can be introduced to help students generalize their current understandings of specific concepts in Euclidean geometry. Of these concepts, Taxicab geometry perturbs students’ definition of congruence. This research project is part of a larger research project that aims to encourage students to define congruence with respect to isometries. Using the APOS framework, data collected from classroom participation was analyzed to investigate how students would develop this definition in Taxicab geometry.Item Application of the Cox Proportional Hazards Model for the Quantitative Analysis of LC-MS Proteomics Data(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Arreola, Ivan; Han, DavidAlong with quantitative, analytical genomics, proteomics continues to be a growing field for determining the gene and cellular functions at the protein level. As the liquid chromatography mass spectrometryphy (LC-MS) experiments produce protein peak intensities data, statistical and computational techniques are required to conduct quantitative analytical proteomics. The LC-MS proteomics data often have large quantities of missing peak intensities due to censoring of the low-abundance spectral features. Because of this, the observed peak intensities from the LC-MS method are all positive, skewed, and often left-censored. The classical survival analysis methods are ideal to detect differentially expressed proteins among different groups. These methods include the non-parametric rank sum (RS) tests such as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) and Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) tests, parametric surivival models such as the accelerated failure time (AFT) model with popular lifetime distributions; log-normal (LN), log-logistic (LL), and Weibull (W) for modeling the peak intensity data. As an alternative approach, here we propose the Cox proportional hazards (PH) method, a popular semi-parametric model for modeling survival data. The proposed regression-based method allows for leniency on the hazard function by alleviating the requirements of distribution-specific hazard functions. With the hopes of gaining more insightful biological information for cellular functions at the protein level, the statistical properties of each method are investigated through a simulation study and an application to the Type I diabetes dataset.Item Comparison of Regression Methods to Identify Differential Expression in RNA-Sequencing Count Data from the Serial Analysis of Gene Expression(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2019) Arreola, Ivan; Han, DavidComparative RNA-sequencing analysis for the Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) can help identify changes in gene expression which are characteristic to human diseases. Since the RNA-sequencing experiment measures gene expressions in the form of counts, usually with a large degree of skewness, the analysis methods based on continuous probability distributions are generally inappropriate for modeling this type of data. Currently, the parametric regression techniques for solving this problem are based on the well-known discrete probability distributions such as Poisson and negative binomial. In order to overcome this modeling challenge with higher flexibilities to account for a wide range of dispersion levels, here we introduce an alternative Generalized Linear Model (GLM) based on the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson distribution, also known as COM-Poisson or CMP distribution. The CMP regression model generalizes the standard Poisson and negative binomial regressions, and it is suitable for fitting count data with varying degrees of over- and under-dispersions. Using simulated and real SAGE datasets, the performance of the proposed method is assessed in comparison to the Poisson- and negative binomial-based regression models.