Creative Components
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PublicationUsing Greenhouse Agro-Parks to Mitigate Poor Soil Conditions in the Turks and Caicos Islands( 2022-05)This Creative Component is titled "Using Greenhouse Agro-Parks to Mitigate Poor Soil Conditions in the Turks and Caicos Islands. A greenhouse agro-park is a crop production facility that comprise greenhouses, grading and packaging area, bathroom facility, chemicals and fertilizer storage area, cold storage for produce, retail and whole selling area, water harvesting facility and more. The greenhouse agro-park concept is a model that caters for the entire process from seed sowing to storage and marketing. The management of the greenhouse agro-park is done by a farmers group that is trained in greenhouse crop production and management. A greenhouse agro-park is a viable supplemental and or alternative crop production system in the Turks and Caicos Islands because crop production outdoors is negligible partially because of poor soil conditions (high ph, low cec, poor water holding capacity, minimal interest, etc.). This Creative Component is meant to address a real issue in the Turks and Caicos Islands which is to improve local fruit and vegetable production and consequently reducing imports; creating employment; increasing local fruit and vegetable production; engaging younger youths; and improving overall food security on the Islands.
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PublicationAn Education Trajectory( 2022-05)Scientific literacy, discussion, and communication are all vital skills an undergraduate student must possess in order to succeed in their academic and career goals. Our goal was to develop these skills in undergraduates using a selected teaching technique. Argument based learning (ABL) is a teaching technique that focuses on developing a student’s ability to provide information and ideas in order to supply the class with an educational conversation (Hand, et al. 2016). A wide variety of classrooms could be considered when implementing ABL, it is not limited to a specific age group or setting. The overarching goal of ABL is to foster a student-focused, discussion-based learning environment. The contrast to ABL is the traditional form of lecture-oriented, passive-learning. It is argued that the traditional technique does not promote long term retention of materials and ideas (Cherney, 2008). Lecture-based learning though can be successful in certain contexts. Many students produce good results in response to memorization-based courses that focus on exploring the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (Sivaraman & Krishna, 2015). However, other students consistently struggle. If the regurgitation of facts is all that is required to pass an exam, then the student will memorize, repeat, and forget. Some students might forget large portions of the material, making the specific teaching method ineffective for them in the long term. With the ABL method, students are required to reflect on and defend their material, creating a deeper level of thinking.
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PublicationImmunotherapeutics in the Management of Bladder Cancer( 2023-05)Bladder cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the United States, ultimately making bladder cancer management prevalent today. Immunotherapy poses a difference in cancer treatments used previously, which may result in an increased quality of life during treatment. The canine species can be used as a model organism. This can be used to study and relate cancer genetics to humans based on a variety of factors. Cancer has the ability to evade the immune system allowing tumor survival, proliferation, and dissemination. Cytokines and other factors are released from the tumor site to modify the immune response, enhancing tumor development. The overexpression of TGF-β results in the production of immunosuppressive immune cells, which promotes continued evasion of the immune system. Inhibiting TGF-β may decrease immunosuppressive immune cells within the microenvironment and decrease PD-L1 expression, resulting in increased efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors. Using combination therapy with an immune checkpoint inhibitor and a TGF-β inhibitor may increase the efficacy of treatment and increase the prognosis of bladder cancer.
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PublicationUsing APIs to Build Useful Applications( 2023-05)APIs are essential building blocks for all types of applications that we use every day. Even though people usually can’t see the work that they are doing behind the scenes, their ability to easily transfer data into application frameworks enables users to collect information from various sources around the world. In this report, I take a brief look at some background information about APIs, and then get some hands-on experience with them by building an application for a Tidbyt device, which is a smart-LED display. The application collects college basketball information from Rapid API, and displays information about a team’s previous game and their next game. By creating this application, it becomes easier to understand how APIs can provide the information needed to build apps that people use every day.
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PublicationCamera Device Identification and the Effects of Underexposure( 2023-05)Technology today allows a photograph from a digital camera to be matched with the camera that took it. However, the matching software was created over 10 years ago using data that is not necessarily representative of today’s data. The objective of this work is to look at the case where photographs that are acquired are underexposed. The data used for these experiments are taken from StegoAppDB, a forensic imaging database. We obtain the PRNU fingerprints of the cameras and test against fingerprints from other images. Using the peak to correlation energy (PCE) as a similarity metric, the image fingerprint and camera fingerprint are compared. A PCE score less than 60 signifies that the image did not originate from the camera -- not a match; otherwise, it did. Error rates for auto-exposed and under-exposed images were based on these comparisons. Using a carefully curated data set of smartphone images, a PCE threshold of 60 results in a false positive rate of 5.86*10-3 when comparing autoexposure fingerprints to underexposure test images.