Digital Commons Network^™

Saudi Elementary Mathematics Teachers’ Knowledge For Teaching Fractions, Mona Khalifah A Aladil

Dissertations

Recent reform efforts in Saudi Arabia attend to mathematics instruction with a great deal of emphasis to improve Saudi mathematics education. Studies in different countries have confirmed that teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching plays an important role in mathematical quality of instruction and students’ achievement (e.g., Ball, 1990; Baumert et al., 2010; Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005). Yet few studies about mathematics teachers’ knowledge for teaching have been conducted in the Saudi context. This study investigates Saudi elementary mathematics teachers’ knowledge for teaching in the content strand of rational numbers with an emphasis on fractions, which is an important step …

Response Of Deep Aquifers To Climate Variability, Karem Fathy Abdelgaber Abdelmohsen

Dissertations

Our recent analysis of Temporal Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) solutions over the largest aquifer system in Africa (the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System: NSAS) revealed that while the response of deep aquifers to climatic variations remains a relatively slow process that takes thousands to tens of thousands of years, there is a much faster response in aquifers that are characterized by dense networks of faults, fractures and karst as is the case with the NSAS. This rapid groundwater flow, when it occurs, is detected as an increase in GRACE_TWS over areas downgradient and distant (hundreds of km) from …

Enhancement Of Critical Current In High-Temperature Superconductors By Ion Beam Irradiation Induced Defects, Prashanta Mani Niraula

Dissertations

Particle irradiation is used to induce defects in high-temperature superconducting Y₁Ba₂Cu₃O_7-x (YBCO) coated conductors, containing predominantly c-axis oriented barium zirconate (BZO) nanorods as pre-existing vortex pinning defects. Samples are irradiated with 50.0 MeV Cu ions with doses of 2.5 x 10¹², 2.0 x 10¹², 1.5 x 10¹², 1.0 x 10¹², 0.75 x 10¹², 0.5 x 10¹², 0.05 x 10¹² ions/cm². The dose of 0.5 x 10¹² ions/cm² is found to be the optimal dose with a …

On Simes’S Second Conjecture: An Extended Single-Step Simes Test Procedure For Multiple Testing, Matthew G. Hudson

Dissertations

One of the major concerns with multiple tests of significance is controlling the family wise error rate. Various methods have been developed to ensure that the false positive rate be maintained at some prespecified level. One of the most well know being the Bonferroni procedure. Simes presented an improved Bonferroni procedure for testing the global hypothesis that is more powerful and less conservative, especially with positively correlated tests. While Simes’s procedure is more powerful, it does not allow for making inferences on the individual hypotheses. However, the Simes procedure has since become the foundation of many p-value based multiple testing …

Hierarchical Aggregation Of Multidimensional Data For Efficient Data Mining, Safaa Khalil Alwajidi

Dissertations

Big data analysis is essential for many smart applications in areas such as connected healthcare, intelligent transportation, human activity recognition, environment, and climate change monitoring. Traditional data mining algorithms do not scale well to big data due to the enormous number of data points and the velocity of their generation. Mining and learning from big data need time and memory efficiency techniques, albeit the cost of possible loss in accuracy. This research focuses on the mining of big data using aggregated data as input. We developed a data structure that is to be used to aggregate data at multiple resolutions. …

Monitoring Salt Diapir Related Land Deformation And Distribution: A Geophysical And Remote Sensing Approach Jazan Province, Saudi Arabia, Hannah G. Pankratz

Dissertations

Salt diapirs are rarely preserved on the surface and seldom considered as environmental hazards. The Jazan city diapir (JZD) is located in southwest Saudi Arabia along the Red Sea coastal plain and outcrops in the middle of a rapidly growing port city. The intrusion of the diapir (~ 2 km²) into the overburden sediments continues to cause uneven surfaces, compromises building foundations and infrastructure, caused dissolution sinkholes, and limits the expansion of the city along the coastline. This research aims to better understand the distribution and deformation associated with salt diapirs in arid environments.

Using integrated Interferometric Synthetic …

On The Local Theory Of Profinite Groups, Mohammad Shatnawi

Dissertations

Let G be a finite group, and H be a subgroup of G. The transfer homomorphism emerges from the natural action of G on the cosets of H. The transfer was first introduced by Schur in 1902 [22] as a construction in group theory, which produce a homomorphism from a finite group G into H/H^' an abelian group where H is a subgroup of G and H' is the derived group of H. One important first application is Burnside’s normal p-complement theorem [5] in 1911, although he did not use the transfer homomorphism explicitly to prove it. …

Application Of Artificial Intelligence And Geographic Information System For Developing Automated Walkability Score, Md Mehedi Hasan

Dissertations

Walking is considered as one of the major modes of active transportation, which contributes to the livability of cities. It is highly important to ensure walk friendly sidewalks to promote human physical activities along roads. Over the last two decades, different walk scores were estimated in respect to walkability measures by applying different methods and approaches. However, in the era of big data and machine learning revolution, there is still a gap to measure the composite walkability score in an automated way by applying and quantifying the activityfriendliness of walkable streets. In this study, a street-level automated walkability score was …

The Assessment Of Co2 Exposures, Workload Demands, And Musculoskeletal Disorder Risk On Heart Rate For Select Craft Brewery Job Tasks, David L. Huizen

Dissertations

Americans have embraced craft beer, and the ensuing demand has resulted in an ever-increasing number of craft breweries opening over the past 20 years. Craft brewers are generally small employers and, as such, lack the resources necessary to address the safety and health of their employees adequately. Brewers face many safety and health hazards in their work environment. These hazards include exposures to carbon dioxide (CO₂), workload demand, and MSD risk. It is essential to evaluate these hazards in craft breweries as they handle carbon dioxide (CO₂) differently than large breweries by having the CO_{2 …}

Embedded Gold Nanoparticles For Metal Enhanced Photoluminescence, Hasna Alali

Dissertations

Noble metal nanoparticles (MNPs) have attracted great attention in electronics, solar cells and catalysis. Their unique optical properties and biocompatibility makes them useful in biological applications like imaging, drug delivery, therapy and diagnostic. At the surface of MNPs the collective oscillation of free electrons resonates with a particular wavelength of incident light, generating the Localized Surface Plasmons Resonance (LSPR). LSPR results in absorption and scattering of incident light. Scattering results in reflecting photons and absorption leads to enhanced photoluminescence and quenching of fluorophores, if the fluorophore is in the vicinity of MNPs.

Most of the studies in this regard have …

Statistical Downscaling Techniques To Enhance The Spatial Resolution Of The Grace Satellite Data And To Fill Temporal Gaps, Hossein Sahour

Dissertations

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has been successfully used to monitor variations in terrestrial water storage (GRACE_TWS ) and groundwater storage (GRACE_GWS) across the globe, yet such applications are hindered on local scales by the limited spatial resolution of GRACE data. Using the Lower Peninsula of Michigan as a test site, I developed optimum procedures to downscale GRACE Release-06 monthly mascon solutions. A four-fold exercise is conducted. Cluster analysis is performed to identify the optimum number and distribution of clusters (areas) of contiguous pixels of similar geophysical signals (GRACE_TWS time series); three clusters are …

A Comprehensive Security Approach On Data Race Detection And Deepfake Defense, Yu Guo

Dissertations

In the past decades, even the computer techniques have a significant improvement. The topic about security will be never out of date.

To meet with the requirement of computation, the number of CPU cores has changed from single core to multi-cores. At the same time, the multi-thread programs are also proposed to maximize the advantages of multi-core computing power. While even the performance has been improved, but it also brings some new issues which were never happened on sequential programs called current bugs. Data race is a major type of current bugs, it is happened when multiple threads access the …

Resource Optimization In Support Of Iot Applications, Ihab Ahmed Mohammed

Dissertations

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart communities, managing computation and communication resources required by billions of smart devices becomes a concern. To tackle this problem, we develop algorithms for resource management to ensure better Quality of Service (QoS), safety, and performance. We focus our efforts on three problems.

In the first problem, we studied the strict QoS requirements of applications and differentiated service requirements in different situations of vehicular networks. We propose a generic prioritization and resource management algorithm that can be used to prioritize the processing of received packets in vehicular networks. We formulate …

Accumulation Of Polar Vorticity On Giant Planets: Towards A Three-Dimensional Theory, Shawn R. Brueshaber

Dissertations

My research investigates the polar atmospheric dynamics of the giant planets: Jupiter and Saturn (gas giants), and Uranus and Neptune (ice giants). I conduct my research modifying and applying the Explicit Planetary Isentropic Coordinate global circulation code to model the polar regions of the four giant planets.

The motivation behind my research is to uncover the reason why giant planet polar atmospheric dynamics differ. Jupiter features multiple circumpolar cyclones arranged in geometrical configurations, whereas Saturn features a single pole-centered cyclone. Uranus and Neptune also appear to have single pole-centered cyclones, albeit, larger than those on Saturn. …

Maia And Admonita: Mandatory Integrity Control Language And Dynamic Trust Framework For Arbitrary Structured Data, Wassnaa Al-Mawee

Dissertations

The expansion of attacks against information systems of companies that operate nuclear power stations and other energy facilities in the United States and other countries, are noticeable with potential catastrophic real-world implications. Data integrity is a fundamental component of information security. It refers to the accuracy and the trustworthiness of data or resources. Data integrity within information systems becomes an important factor of security protection as the data becomes more integrated and crucial to decision-making. The security threats brought by human errors whether, malicious or unintentional, such as viruses, hacking, and many other cybersecurity threats, are dangerous and require mandatory …

A Unified Decentralized Trust Framework For Detection Of Iot Device Attacks In Smart Homes, Hussein Salim Qasim Alsheakh

Dissertations

Trust in Smart Home technology security is a primary concern for consumers, which can prevent them from adopting smart home services. Such concerns are due to following reasons; (i) nature of IoT devices– which due to their limited computational and resource capabilities, cannot support traditional on-device security controls (ii) any breach to cyber-attacks have an immediate impact on the smart homeowner, compared to traditional cyber-attacks (iii) a large variety of different applications and services under the umbrella of make an overarching security framework for smart homes fundamentally challenging for both providers to offer and owners to manage.

This dissertation offers …

Investigation Of Finite Temperature And Continuum Effects On Nuclear Excitations, Herlik Wibowo

Dissertations

The low-energy nuclear response at finite-temperature significantly affects the radiative neutron capture reaction rates of the r-process nucleosynthesis. In order to address this topic, the first part of this study focuses on the response of compound nuclei or nuclei at finite temperature. The thermal nuclear response satisfies the Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) with the static and dynamical kernels of different origins. While the origin of the static kernel is the nearly instantaneous nucleon-meson interaction, the dynamical kernel is induced by the coupling between nucleons and phonons. The presence of singularities in the dynamical kernel makes the BSE unsolvable, however, a time …

Integrating Detailed Petrography, Geochemistry, And Mineralogy To Elucidate Extensive Early Diagenesis In The Eocene Carbonates Of Qatar, Brooks H. Ryan

Dissertations

Eocene carbonates comprising the Umm er Radhuma (UER), Rus, and Dammam Formations, cover 80% of the surface and extend >300 m into the subsurface of Qatar. These rocks record marine sedimentation in shallow sub-tidal to restricted settings. Despite undergoing only shallow burial (<1000 m), extensive diagenetic alteration has occurred. Given that little work on this topic has been published previously, the objectives of this work are to document diagenesis in the Eocene, and to integrate petrography, mineralogy, and geochemistry to delineate the timing and environments of diagenesis of these Eocene carbonates. Detailed petrographic data show that dolomitization occurred early in the UER, before the formation of diagenetic chert, palygorskite, pyrite, calcite, and gypsum cements. Bulk dolomite δ¹⁸O values, coupled with clumped isotope-derived (Δ47) temperatures and dolomitizing fluid δ¹⁸O values, suggest dolomitization took place in near-normal marine fluids, perhaps during shallow burial. These data challenge the current paradigm of large-scale, top-down hypersaline reflux dolomitization in the UER. Associated depth trends of increasing crystal size and with increasing stoichiometry and cation ordering …

Program Testing And Synthesis By Program Semantics, Lin Cheng

Dissertations

GUIs are event-driven applications where the flow of the program is determined by user actions such as mouse clicks and key presses. GUI testing is a challenging task not only because of the combinatorial explosion in the number of event sequences, but also because of the difficulty to cover the large number of data values. To tackle this problem, we propose two algorithms: GUICat and GUICat2.

GUICat is a white-box GUI testing tool that augments traditional sequence generation techniques with concolic execution. It also has a cloud-based parallel algorithm for mitigating both event sequence explosion and data value explosion, by …

Statistical Properties And Applications Of Press Statistic, Ida Marie Alcantara

Dissertations

The most popularly used statistic R^₂ has a fundamental weakness in model building: it favors adding more predictors to the model because R² can only increase. In effect, the additional predictors start fitting the noise in data. Other criterion in selecting a regression model such as R² _adj , AIC, SBC, and Mallow’s C_p does not guarantee the model selected will also make better prediction of future values. To avoid this, data scientists withhold a percentage of the data for validation purposes. The PRESS statistic does something similar by withholding each observation in calculating its own …

On Codes Over Rings: The Macwilliams Extension Theorem And The Macwilliams Identities, Noha Abdelghany

Dissertations

The MacWilliams extension theorem for code equivalence and the MacWilliams identities for weight enumerators of a code and its dual code are two of the most important results in classical coding theory. In this thesis, we study how much these two results could be extended to codes over more general alphabets, beyond finite fields. In particular, we study the MacWilliams extension theorem and the MacWilliams identities for codes over rings and modules equipped with general weight functions.

An Integrated Approach (Remote Sensing, Hydrogeology, Gis, And Statistical Modeling) To Identify The Distribution Of Shallow Groundwater Occurrences Over Southwest Saudi Arabia, Fahad Khudier Alshehri

Dissertations

Identifying shallow (near-surface) groundwater in arid and hyper-arid areas has significant societal benefits, yet it is a costly operation when traditional methods (geophysics and drilling) are applied over large domains. In this study, we developed and successfully applied methodologies that rely heavily on readily available temporal, visible and near-infrared, radar, and thermal remote sensing data sets and field data, as well as statistical approaches to map the distribution of shallow (1–5 m deep) groundwater occurrences in Al Qunfudah Province, Saudi Arabia and to identify the factors controlling their development. A four-fold approach was adopted: (1) constructing a digital database to …

Computer Simulations Of Muscle Driven Undulatory Locomotion, Ye Luo

Dissertations

A novel muscle driven method is developed to mimic contracting and expanding of muscles, in a fish-like swimming body, which cause its body flapping in the transversal direction and create thrust force to push its body to cruise in the longitudinal direction. The muscle deformation is realized by using the RATTLE constraint algorithm. The turbulent fluids are treated by a multi-relaxation time lattice Boltzmann method with a large eddy simulation. The fish body is dealt with a lattice spring model and interactions between fluids and solid structures are handled by a direct-forcing immersed boundary method. Validations are conducted by comparing …

Extremal Problems On Induced Graph Colorings, James Hallas

Dissertations

Graph coloring is one of the most popular areas of graph theory, no doubt due to its many fascinating problems and applications to modern society, as well as the sheer mathematical beauty of the subject. As far back as 1880, in an attempt to solve the famous Four Color Problem, there have been numerous examples of certain types of graph colorings that have generated other graph colorings of interest. These types of colorings only gained momentum a century later, however, when in the 1980s, edge colorings were studied that led to vertex colorings of various types, led by the introduction …

High Performance And Machine Learning Algorithms For Brain Fmri Data, Taban Eslami

Dissertations

Brain disorders are very difficult to diagnose for reasons such as overlapping nature of symptoms, individual differences in brain structure, lack of medical tests and unknown causes of some disorders. The current psychiatric diagnostic process is based on behavioral observation and may be prone to misdiagnosis.

Noninvasive brain imaging technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) make the process of understanding the structure and function of the brain easier. Quantitative analysis of brain imaging data using machine learning and data mining techniques can be advantageous not only to increase the accuracy of brain disorder …

Cross Language Information Transfer Between Modern Standard Arabic And Its Dialects – A Framework For Automatic Speech Recognition System Language Model, Tiba Zaki Abdulhameed

Dissertations

Significant advances have been made with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) applications. Yet, dialectal conversation ASR is still trailing behind due to limited language resources. As is the case in most cultures, the formal Modern Standard Arabic language is not used in daily life. Instead, varieties of regional dialects are spoken, which creates a dire need to address dialect ASR systems. Processing MSA language naturally poses considerable challenges that are passed on to the processing of its derived dialects. In dialects, many words have gradually morphed from MSA pronunciations and at many times have different usages. Also, …