Otterbein University is a private university in Westerville, Ohio. It offers 74 majors and 44 minors as well as eight graduate programs. The university was founded in 1847 by the Church of the United Brethren in Christ and named for United Brethren founder the Rev. Philip William Otterbein. As a result of a division and two mergers involving the church, it has been associated since 1968 with the United Methodist Church. In 2010, its name was changed back from Otterbein College to Otterbein University because of an increasing number of graduate and undergraduate programs.It is primarily an undergraduate institution with approximately 2,300 undergraduate and 450 graduate students on the campus. The school's mascot is Cardy the Cardinal and the school is a member of the Ohio Athletic Conference in NCAA Division III athletics.
The popularity of therapy dog programs on college campuses highlights the growing recognition that dogs can provide valuable support to university students. As researchers have shown, college students frequently report an improved sense of emotional wellbeing after they interact with therapy dogs (Jalongo, 2021. The canine-campus connection: Roles for dogs in the lives of college students. Purdue University Press). Our study extends the research to examine the effects that such interaction can have on attention and cognitive processing. We implemented a converging operations model that integrated both attentional performance measures and workload assessments with self-reported measures of affect. We used Attention Restoration Theory (ART) as a conceptual framework. ART suggests that exposure to nature restores and protects limited attentional reserves. We predicted that, when compared with a control group, experimental participants who interacted with therapy dogs would show enhanced attentional performance and less strenuous cognitive workload. The experimental group received a 20-min exposure to therapy dogs, when they could pet and play with the dogs. The control group viewed a 20-min video of a dog playing and riding in a car. Following these sessions, participants completed the global precedence Navon attention task, followed by a workload assessment using the NASA-TLX. Prior to the 20-min session and immediately following the completion of the workload assessment, participants completed an affect assessment using the Positive and Negative Affect Scale. Participants exposed to therapy dogs showed fewer attentional lapses, fewer workload demands, and greater declines in negative affect compared with the control group. We observed limited correlations between affect, attention, and workload, suggesting the independence of cognitive and emotional benefits from each other. Our findings suggest that ART may serve as a useful theoretical framework in animal-assisted intervention (AAI) research. We propose that the inclusion of attentional and workload measures in future AAI research will yield valuable insights.
Shape from Focus (SFF) is a critical passive optical measurement technique used to reconstruct the 3D shape of objects from a sequence of 2D images captured at varying focal planes. This review provides a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the evolution of SFF strategies, tracing the transition from classical handcrafted focus measurement operators to contemporary deep learning-based architectures. We categorize traditional methods into spatial and transform-domain operators, evaluating their performance in terms of sharpness extraction and noise resilience. The paper further investigates the impact of convolutional neural networks and transformer-based models, which have redefined state of the art performance by learning hierarchical feature representations. In addition to algorithmic advancements, we examine the role of pre-processing, post-processing, and approximation frameworks in enhancing 3D reconstruction accuracy. The practical utility of these strategies is demonstrated across diverse high precision fields, including semiconductor inspection, digital morphology in healthcare. Lastly, we outline future research potential in autonomous 3D vision systems by discussing the unresolved issues in this field, such as the scarcity of ground truth data and the computational needs of real time processing.
As Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LP-WANs) continue to establish a strong presence in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, providing secure communication becomes increasingly important. For instance, LoRa (Long Range) is a popular low-energy and long-range technology solution, but has no security features which opens the system up to a variety of attacks including eavesdropping and packet injection. This study presents a comparative analysis of three symmetric encryption techniques (AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), ChaCha20, and XOR-based encryption) when deployed over a LoRa-based wireless network. The analysis was carried out in a experimental testbed constructed with Arduino MKRWAN 1310 devices, and a passive LilyGO LoRa32 sniffer, consisting of descriptive experiments measuring packet losses, duplication, and time behavior through 100 transmitted packets. Our results indicate that while AES is able to provide robust security, more packet loss $(15 \%)$ is observed along with latency variation from computational demands. Comparatively, ChaCha20 and XOR did not experience any packet loss and displayed markedly stable timing, but resulted in increased packets being identified (16% duplication). Our results highlight the compromises of security and performance and provide practical implications for induced encryption choices of secure and reliable low-rate LoRa communications.
Wild Eastern Gray Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) rehabilitated at a Midwestern facility, the Ohio Wildlife Center, were experiencing an increased mortality rate due to unknown respiratory illness in 2022-2023. A qPCR test was developed for B. bronchiseptica to test symptomatic animals. Though 65 individuals were tested, all tests were found to be negative for B. bronchiseptica. This negative result strongly indicates that the mortalities were caused by aspiration pneumonia or some other unknown pathogen.
