Interdisciplinary – Page 25 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Interdisciplinary

The Effect of Disaster-induced Displacement on Social Behaviour: The Case of Hurricane Harvey

In recent decades, whether climate change is real has become more and more of a partisan issue among everyday people. Over 97% of the scientific community, however, agrees that the climate has been changing due to human activity. In order to see if and how people’s views change when they actually experience a natural disaster that is likely due to climate change, we conduct an analysis of over 100,000 tweets before and after Hurricane Harvey.The analysis consists of labelling each tweet as part of one of six categories (climate change, Hurricane Harvey, sports, politics, policing, and other). Then, if the tweet relates to climate, the disposition of the tweet’s author towards climate change was also noted. Currently, in order to make the analysis of data more efficient, several machine learning classifiers are being built in the programming languages python and R. Once these classifier models are created, we will benchmark them and then use the best performing model to label new tweets at a much faster pace than a team of human coders. With the fully labeled corpus of climate change tweets, the study will be able to shed light on behavioral and political changes before and after climate change-induced events. Keywords: climate change, hurricane, Harvey, twitter, politics

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Using C++ to create a predictive model of twitter data to analyze social and political behavior.

As much as the media covers natural disasters extensively, little is known about the underlying effects aside from the “who was hurt or killed and what was destroyed” coverage of the disaster. Natural disasters often cause geographic displacement of individuals from their homes and communities to new ones. These events result in more than just the loss of physical property, as community and neighborhood attributes encompass many different aspects of an individual’s social relationships and the cultural institutions. Moving to a new community changes these attributes and will affect an individual’s political attitudes and behaviors. The ongoing post-Harvey migration provides a unique opportunity to examine the effect of social contact and political context in a case where these encounters could not have otherwise been anticipated by the individuals affected. This research study seeks to examine the political consequences of Hurricane Harvey by studying post-Harvey migration patterns as an unexpected or exogenous shock via data analysis techniques such as Natural Language Processing using C++ programming. This analysis will allow us to study variations in the decision of displaced individuals to move to different areas and how this affects their associated experiences once they move, and how people’s political attitudes and behaviors change in response to rapid demographic shifts in their communities in the future. This research is therefore able to address “How does local context affect political opinions and behaviors?” Using hand-coded twitter data, we were able to create various predictive models coded in R, Python, and C++. My specific research focuses on building a C++ predictive model. The C++ uses a score based system on NLP and even caught mistakes made during manual coding. We were able to determine that natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey do influence social and political behaviors of the people affected by using an analysis of social media such as twitter. We also determined that the C++ predictive model had a very accurate prediction on sample twitter data.

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Undergraduate Mathematics Instruction for Indigenous Students

The United States has a problem with inequitable education for Indigenous students. Specifically, Indigenous students are underrepresented in STEM fields and do not have college graduation rates equal to other racial and/or ethnic groups. To address this, the first step of this study involved building a database of Indigenous Serving post-secondary institutions in the United States, defined as institutions with levels at or above 10% Indigenous undergraduate enrollment. This database yielded over 50 institutions that will be used to reach out to faculty to participate in a survey to understand what these instructors would like to learn more about in terms of teaching mathematics to Indigenous students. This information will then be used to create a professional development program and materials for mathematics instructors at Indigenous Serving Institutions with the ultimate goal of improving mathematics education for Indigenous students.

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Study of Pandemic Publishing: How Scholarly Literature is Affected by COVID-19 Pandemic

Borui Zhang Pronouns: He/Him/His Research Mentor(s): Yulia Sevryugina, Chemistry Librarian/ Senior Associate Librarian Research Mentor School/College/Department: Library, Presentation Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021 Session: Session 4 (2pm-2:50pm) Breakout Room: Room 15 Presenter: 6 Event Link Abstract For privacy concerns this abstract cannot be published at this time. Authors: Borui Zhang Research Method: Library/Archival/Internet Research

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Developing an eHealth Yoga Program for Children

With the rise in popularity of children’s yoga and a greater emphasis on both mental and physical health it is important to establish potential benefits that are reliable and backed by evidence found with strong methodology. Recent systematic reviews, focusing on school aged yoga studies, concluded that methodological limitations such as not measuring fidelity of program implementation (FOI) make it difficult to provide trustworthy conclusions. A component of FOI assessment is establishing Inter-rater reliability for observational measures. This study will explore the potential benefits in children as a direct result of a virtual yoga program implemented into the school day, looking specifically at levels of physical activity, stress, and interoceptive awareness, as well as sleep patterns. Trained raters will identify whether children are on task or off task during the virtual yoga sessions. To measure outcome changes, parents/guardians will complete online surveys using valid and reliable scales. In order to limit statistical ambiguities between raters, they completed three rounds of trainings and practice using recorded yoga sessions. Percent agreement and Cohen’s kappa were established, and necessary adjustments were made to the coding system before the next round of practice. Agreement between the raters improved over the practice trials demonstrated by a change in Cohen’s kappa (k = 0.56 to 0.80). Having reliable participation data will allow the researchers to compare levels of participation with data collected from the parent/guardian surveys. Results will establish reliable new evidence for the field and have important applications for future yoga research in school-based settings.

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Literature Survey and Ontological Modeling of COVID-19 Related Acute Kidney Injury Manifestations

COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus known as the SARS-CoV-2, has many different phenotypic outcomes, or observable characteristics that result from molecular and cellular host-coronavirus interactions. One of these outcomes is Acute Kidney Injury, or AKI. When the virus enters the host cell by binding to the ACE2 receptor, the regulatory Renin-Angiotensin (RAS) hormone system is activated resulting in untoward effects on multiple organs, of which those pertaining to the kidney are of interest. As reported in existing literature, pathophysiological mechanisms associate the novel coronavirus to outcomes related to kidney damage closely following the RAS system as well as signaling pathways like complement activation, yet much of the specific interactions are still under close study.

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Enriched Biological Processes of Human Genes Interacting with SARS-CoV-2

SARS-CoV-2 has imprinted itself on our modern society, bringing lives around the world to a grinding halt. For this study, we focused primarily on the pathways leading to Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) and investigated how we could map this into Ontology. We started with looking at pathways to AKI, and with the use of BioGRID, a database compiling protein and gene information regarding SARS-CoV-2, and DAVID Bioinformatics, and the goal was to map pathways involved in SARS-CoV-2 manifestations. Much of our research involved trying to find an effective way to study the multitude of information presented with the open resources provided by the internet. To do so, we looked at other studies to understand how they used BioGRID and other protein databases for their studies.

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Whole Health Educational Resource Development and Evaluation for Veterans and VA Staff

Whole Health is a system of holistic care focusing on physical and social parameters in the care of Veteran patients that is in place at VA hospitals around the country. The aim of this study is to investigate participants’ perceptions of the Whole Health system of care. The study methodology focuses on a survey containing questions regarding different areas of the Circle of Whole Health (a widely used framework for Whole Health at the VA). The survey is designed by a team of undergraduate researchers at the University of Michigan, working with a physician researcher at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. The survey was sent out to Veterans, VA staff, VA volunteers, and family members of Veterans. At the time of publication of this abstract, the data has been collected and preliminary analysis is in process. Analysis of the survey results in terms of descriptive statistics and tests of relationships, using chi-square tests, is being performed. Specific, detailed, and final results will be available at the time of the Symposium presentation. This final information could be used to better understand which modalities are most understood by Veterans, which areas are most understood by those who support Veterans (such as VA staff, VA volunteers, and family members), and which Whole Health modalities are most effective in improving Veterans’ physical or mental health.

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Whole Health Educational Resource Development and Evaluation for Veterans and VA Staff

The Veterans Association (VA) is a government agency providing comprehensive healthcare for Veterans. Many VA hospitals have implemented the Whole Health system of care which is an approach to healing that emphasizes patient empowerment and holistic methods that treat the body, mind and spirit. Some integrative methods included in Whole Health are yoga, music therapy, tai chi and personal goal setting. Previous research has shown that therapies, such as these, have improved symptoms of anxiety, stress, depression and PTSD in Veterans. Given these benefits, our goal is to analyze perceptions and uses of holistic services. Results can be used for self-reflection or possible pragmatic areas of emphasis. In order to collect data, a twenty-question survey on Qualtrics will be distributed digitally to Veterans and employees at the VA hospital. We expect a sample size of around 25 participants. The questions are open-ended, multiple choice, scale-based and multiple select. Multiple choice answers will be analyzed quantitatively, while open-ended questions will be examined using keyword coding. At the time of publication of this abstract, the data has been collected and preliminary analysis is in process. Specific, detailed, and final results will be available at the time of the Symposium presentation. Implications include educating Veterans on unfamiliar Whole Health programs and promoting integrative healthcare. Data can also be used to tailor resources for Veterans and employees. The content of future studies will depend on the pending results and analysis.

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Whole Health Educational Resource Development and Evaluation for Veterans and VA Staff

Our research studies how the VA’s Whole Health program affects the health and well-being of Veterans, staff members and volunteers. Whole Health is a holistic system of care at the Veteran Administration Healthcare System that starts with the individual, focusing on eight aspects of their life including exercise, work, leisure, diet, sleep, relationships, spirituality and stress. Preventative care and medical treatment is personalized to what matters to the patient. Our research group is exploring how different integrative medical modalities affect the patient and the various aspects that contribute to their well-being. Background research has shown that yoga may be effective in treating PTSD and chronic lower back pain, while acupuncture has shown to be an effective treatment for disturbed sleep in PTSD patients. Our group has constructed an online survey that will be distributed to a diverse population of Veterans, staff members and volunteers to assess how five modalities affect their well-being. We are focusing our survey on acupuncture, light therapy, yoga, mindfulness meditation and diet. At the time of publication of this abstract, the data has been collected and preliminary analysis is in process. Specific, detailed, and final results will be available at the time of the Symposium presentation. We are expecting to see that some of the modalities being surveyed positively influence the Veterans and hope to find out specifically which aspects of their circle of Whole Health are being targeted. Once the data is collected, we want to look further into how we can continue to work with the VA to improve the personalized care of their Veterans.

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