Browsing by Subject "Composition"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Approaching Composition as Showing–Telling through Translanguaging: Weaving Multilingualism, Multimodality, and Multiliteracies in a Digital Collage Proyecto Final
    (MDPI, 2022) Prada, Josh; World Languages and Cultures, School of Liberal Arts
    Couched in theories of translanguaging, multimodality, and multiliteracies, this article explores digital compositions (i.e., digital collages) as spaces for identity representation through the proyectos finales produced by 22 students in a Spanish composition class for heritage/native speakers in a U.S. university. Each digital collage was accompanied by two written documents: one describing the processes leading to its creation, and another one explaining the meaning of the collage and its components. Qualitative content analysis was used to investigate the submissions, with particular attention paid to instances of identity, experience, and self-representation through complex orchestrations of flexible multilingual and multimodal meaning- and sense-making. The proyecto final is discussed in terms of the curricular innovation for courses designed for racialized language-minoritized multilingual students, describing the nature and affordances of translanguaging in this context, and advancing an approach to digital composing as showing–telling.
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    Indications of Single-Session Improvement in Writing Center Sessions
    (2020-05) Wilder, Aaron; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Fox, Steve; DiCamilla, Fred
    In the complementary fields of Composition and Writing Center Studies, the common goal is to guide writers toward improvement in literate practices. However, the meaning of the word “improvement” has undergone radical shifts across time within both fields. It has of late shifted away from a concrete, product-oriented definition toward a non-concrete, process and person-centered nebula. In short, the field of Writing Studies has become very sure what improvement is not, while less sure what it is. Despite this uncertainty, one area of recent agreement appears to be the importance of control that writers hold in navigating within and across literate contexts, often referred to by the slippery term, agency. This pilot study seeks to utilize the voices of researchers across a spectrum of fields to more precisely define agency. This definition will be consistent with current scholarship in both Composition and Writing Center Studies and informed by related fields such as linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. It will then utilize that definition in constructing a RAD (replicable, aggregable and data-driven) qualitative analysis of post-session interviews between researcher and writer. This method will attempt to determine possibilities and guidelines for future research. Particularly, it will provide a framework for future researchers to measure improvement in writing through a more refined definition of social agency. Through that, it will seek to support previous study which suggests as little as a single session in the Writing Center can demonstrate improvement in students’ perceptions of their own writing.
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    The influence of baseline hardness and chemical composition on enamel demineralization and subsequent remineralization
    (2017-05-09) Alkattan, Rana; Ando, Masatoshi; Lippert, Frank; Cook, Norman Blaine
    BACKGROUND Several studies have reported that harder enamel with higher contents of calcium (Ca), phosphorus (P) and fluorine (F) coupled with lower contents of carbonate (C), magnesium (Mg) and nitrate (N) was found to be more resistant to demineralization. Additionally, the hardness of dental enamel was found to have a strong correlation with its chemical content. However, yet to be established is the relation between the physical and chemical structure of enamel and its response to de- and remineralizing conditions. OBJECTIVES The aims of this laboratory study were: 1) To investigate the hardness and chemical content of sound enamel and their influence on demineralization; 2) To investigate these properties in demineralized enamel and their influence on remineralization; and 3) To investigate these properties in sound enamel and their influence on remineralization. MATERIALS AND METHODS Incipient subsurface caries lesions were created in 94 bovine enamel specimens using Carbopol C907 using three demineralization times. The specimens were then pH-cycled and treated using either 367 ppm F sodium fluoride or a placebo. Knoop surface microhardness (SMH), Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and Transverse microradiography (TMR) were performed on the specimens at all stages and compared between them. TMR variables included integrated mineral loss (ΔZ), Lesion depth (L) and maximum mineral density of the surface zone (SZmax). Data were analyzed using three- and four-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated. RESULTS SMH, ΔZ, L and SZmax were significantly different among stages, demineralization times and treatment. The weight% of F at the surface was significantly affected by treatment, irrespective of demineralization time. A statistically significant moderate correlation was found between SZmax and ΔZ and SZmax and L after pH cycling. SMH also correlated weakly to moderately with TMR data. CONCLUSIONS SMH and SZmax decreased while ΔZ and L increased with increased demineralization time. Both fluoride and non-fluoride specimens were able to remineralize, which emphasizes the role of saliva in mineralization. The Ca:P ratio remained stable at various stages, indicating the stoichiometric dissolution and redeposition of minerals. The greatest deposition of F was at the surface and its increase led to an increase in SMH and SZmax. SMH values showed that harder specimens at baseline and after demineralization remained hard after demineralization and pH-cycling, respectively, although this correlation was weak. Additionally, harder lesions showed less L and ΔZ and greater SZmax. RELEVANCE This in-vitro study will help better understand the caries process and the impact of physical and chemical characteristics of enamel on de- and remineralization challenges.
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    Reading, Writing, and Inquiry
    (Indiana University, 2023) Mahoney, Jennifer; Buchenot, Andy
    This textbook is designed to help students: develop meaningful questions to engage in inquiry, develop strategies for reading rhetorically to understand and comprehend a variety of print/online texts, develop strategies for writing rhetorically to communicate with a variety of audiences for varying purposes, identify as writers who control their own processes for reading, writing, and inquiry. It is a guide that explains concepts like “reading rhetorically” and “synthesis.” It also provides activities that will help students do things like “contribute and use feedback” or “generate reflections.” The textbook argues that these concepts and activities will be useful writers in many situations.
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    Region-specific associations among tissue-level mechanical properties, porosity, and composition in human male femora
    (Elsevier, 2022) Mandair, Gurjit S.; Bigelow, Erin M. R.; Viswanathan, Gowri; Ward, Ferrous S.; Patton, Daniella M.; Schlecht, Stephen H.; Jepsen, Karl J.; Kohn, David H.; Orthopaedic Surgery, School of Medicine
    Region-specific differences in age-related bone remodeling are known to exist. We therefore hypothesized that the decline in tissue-level strength and post-yield strain (PYS) with age is not uniform within the femur, but is driven by region-specific differences in porosity and composition. Four-point bending was conducted on anterior, posterior, medial, and lateral beams from male cadaveric femora (n = 33, 18-89 yrs of age). Mid-cortical porosity, composition, and mineralization were assessed using nano-computed tomography (nanoCT), Raman spectroscopy, and ashing assays. Traits between bones from young and elderly groups were compared, while multivariate analyses were used to identify traits that predicted strength and PYS at the regional level. We show that age-related decline in porosity and mechanical properties varied regionally, with highest positive slope of age vs. Log(porosity) found in posterior and anterior bone, and steepest negative slopes of age vs. strength and age vs. PYS found in anterior bone. Multivariate analyses show that Log(porosity) and/or Raman 1246/1269 ratio explained 46-51% of the variance in strength in anterior and posterior bone. Three out of five traits related to Log(porosity), mineral crystallinity, 1246/1269, mineral/matrix ratio, and/or hydroxyproline/proline (Hyp/Pro) ratio, explained 35-50% of the variance in PYS in anterior, posterior and lateral bones. Log(porosity) and Hyp/Pro ratio alone explained 13% and 19% of the variance in strength and PYS in medial bone, respectively. The predictive performance of multivariate analyses was negatively impacted by pooling data across all bone regions, underscoring the complexity of the femur and that the use of pooled analyses may obscure underlying region-specific differences.
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    Regularized regression on compositional trees with application to MRI analysis
    (Oxford University Press, 2022) Wang, Bingkai; Caffo, Brian S.; Luo, Xi; Liu, Chin-Fu; Faria, Andreia V.; Miller, Michael I.; Zhao, Yi; Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative; Biostatistics, School of Public Health
    A compositional tree refers to a tree structure on a set of random variables where each random variable is a node and composition occurs at each non-leaf node of the tree. As a generalization of compositional data, compositional trees handle more complex relationships among random variables and appear in many disciplines, such as brain imaging, genomics and finance. We consider the problem of sparse regression on data that are associated with a compositional tree and propose a transformation-free tree-based regularized regression method for component selection. The regularization penalty is designed based on the tree structure and encourages a sparse tree representation. We prove that our proposed estimator for regression coefficients is both consistent and model selection consistent. In the simulation study, our method shows higher accuracy than competing methods under different scenarios. By analyzing a brain imaging data set from studies of Alzheimer's disease, our method identifies meaningful associations between memory decline and volume of brain regions that are consistent with current understanding.