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An Exploration Of The Numeracy Skills Required For Safe, Quality Nursing Practice, Anna Wendel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this study was to explore the numeracy skills required for safe, quality nursing practice. Using a descriptive mixed methods design, this study answered two research questions: 1) What numeracy skills do nurses perceive as important for providing safe, quality nursing care in the first three years of practice? 2) How do nurses incorporate numeracy skills into daily patient care during the first three years of practice? Early career nurses from a not-for-profit health care organization in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States (n=109) responded to an online survey tool developed by the student investigator that ranked …

Bayesian Variable Selection Methods For Genome-Wide Association Studies With Categorical Phenotypes, Benazir Rowe

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) attempt to find the associations between genetic markers and studied traits (phenotypes). The problem of GWAS is complex and various methods have been developed to approach it. One of such methods is Bayesian variable selection (BVS). We describe the BVS methods in detail and demonstrate the ability of BVS method Posterior Inference via Model Averaging and Subset Selection (piMASS) to improve the power of detecting phenotype-associated genetic loci, potentially leading to new discoveries from existing data without increasing the sample size.

We present several ways to improve and extend the applicability of piMASS for GWAS. The …

Equivalences Of Determinacy Between Levels Of The Borel Hierarchy And Long Games, And Some Generalizations, Katherine Aimee Yost

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis will be primarily focused on directly proving that the determinacy of Borel games in X^ω is equivalent to the determinacy of certain long open games, from a fragment of ZFC that’s well-known to be insufficient to prove Borel determinacy. The main theorem is a level by level result which shows the equivalence between determinacy of open games in a long tree, [Υ^α], and determinacy of Σ_0^α games in X^ω. In Chapter 9, we mimic the proof used in our main theorem to show that the determinacy of clopen games in the product space X^ω × ω^ω is equivalent …

Advanced Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian Finite Element Methods For Unsteady Multiphysics Problems Involving Moving Interfaces/Boundaries, Rihui Lan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this dissertation, two kinds of arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE)-finite element methods (FEM) within the monolithic approach are studied for unsteady multiphysics coupling problems involving the moving interfaces/boundaries. For the classical affine-type ALE mapping that is studied in the first part of this dissertation, we develop the monolithic ALE-FEM and conduct stability and optimal convergence analyses in the energy norm for the transient Stokes/parabolic interface problem with jump coefficients, and more realistically, for the dynamic fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems by taking the discrete ALE mapping and the discrete mesh velocity into a careful consideration of our numerical analyses and computations, where …

Uncertainty Quantification For Maxwell's Equations, Zhiwei Fang

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation study three different approaches for stochastic electromagnetic fields based on the time domain Maxwell's equations and Drude's model: stochastic Galerkin method, stochastic collocation method, and Monte Carlo class methods. For each method, we study its regularity, stability, and convergence rates. Numerical experiments have been presented to verify our theoretical results. For stochastic collocation method, we also simulate the backward wave propagation in metamaterial phenomenon. It turns out that the stochastic Galerkin method admits the best accuracy property but hugest computational workload as the resultant PDEs system is usually coupled. The Monte Carlo class methods are easy to implement …