Digital Commons Network^™

Earthshine : Photometry, Modeling, And Spectral Observations, Jeffrey Patrick Hickey

Theses

The Earthshine group has been making sustained observations of the Earthshine from Big Bear Solar Observatory in California since late 1998. There have also been intermittent observations from 1994-5. High and low resolution Earthshine spectral observations have also been under taken at Palomar Observatory since 1999. The group has re-invigorated and modernized a nearly forgotten way of measuring the Earth's albedo, and hence its energy balance, previously studied by Danjon (and his followers) for about twenty-five years early in the last century, using their observations of the Earthshine from France. This is an overview paper covering observations, reductions, simulations, and …

Quantity And Quality Simulation In Al Ain Water Distribution System, Awbath Saleh Salem Al Jaberi

Theses

A hydraulic and chlorine simulation is conducted for three selected areas in Al Ain region. WaterCad 7.0, a water distribution system model, was chosen to conduct the simulation of the hydraulic behavior within the water distribution system. The fate of residual chlorine flowing through these systems over time is tracked by this software. The conducted hydraulic model predicts the performance of Al Yahar, AI Dhaher and Sweihan networks. Skeletonaization approach is employed in setting up the model for each system. In this study, the customer storage tanks (CSTs) are taken into consideration in performing the extended period simulation. Each group …

Modeling And Optimization Of Biological Nutrients Removal In Wastewater Treatment Processes Considering Advanced Kinetic Modeling Techniques, Nawras Nabil Ai Ghazaly

Theses

In the field of wastewater treatment, there is an increasing demand to improve the effluent

quality especially if it is going to be discharged to surface water. Effluent discharged

to surface water should have minimum nutrients level (nitrogen and phosphorus) in order

to avoid eutrophication and the resulting algal blooms which deplete the water from the oxygen

needed by other plant and animal species. Moreover, there is a demand to reduce the chemical

consumption in the treatment processes and to depend as much as we can on the biological

Treatment methods in achieving the required effluent quality in terms of …

Network Activity Arising From Optimal Diameters Of Neuronal Processes, Juliane Gansert

Theses

Electrical coupling provides an important pathway for signal transmission between neurons. In several regions of the mammalian brain electrical synapses have been detected, and their role in the synchronization of neural networks and the generation of oscillations has been studied theoretically. Recently, it has been found that the amplitude of the postsynaptic potential is maximized for a specific diameter of the postsynaptic fiber.

In this thesis, the impact of the fiber's diameter on the success or failure of the action potential initiation and propagation is studied theoretically. Systems of two coupled neurons, as well as small networks, are investigated. The …

Comparative Analysis Of Parametric, Nonparametric And Permutation Methods For Differential Expression, Rahul Patil

Theses

DNA microarrays permit us to study the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously. They are now used in many different contexts to compare mRNA levels between two or more samples of cells. Microarray experiments typically give us expression measurements on a large number of genes. Increasing popularity of microarray technology has resulted in a number of tests being proposed to detect differentials expression.

The purpose of study is to compare the parametric, non parametric and permutation tests when applied to microarray data for differential expression analysis. t test (parametric), Mann Whitney test (nonparametric) and Significance of analysis (permutation ) test …

Environmental Policy In Jordan : Analysis, Gap Identification, And Strategies For Improvement, Diana Saed

Theses

Jordan is a country with a tremendously fragile environment. It faces substantial environmental challenges due to its delicate environmental resources and its limited financial assets. These challenges are aggravated by the scarcity of available water, deterioration of the water resources, land contamination, desertification, mismanagement of land use, and air pollution. Attempting to describe the “State of the Environment” and to provide an informed analysis of the threats to the nation’s environment is a Herculean task. This analysis examines the efforts made by Jordan in regard to protection and management of the environment. This thesis provides a snapshot of the major …

A Data Gathering Toolkit For Biological Information Integration, Munira Lokhandwala

Theses

SYSTERS is a biological information integration system containing protein sequences from many protein databases such as Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL and also protein sequences from complete genomes available at Ensembl, The Arabidopsis Information Resource, SGD and GeneDB. For some protein sequences their encoding nucleotide sequences can be found in their corresponding websites. However, for some protein sequences their encoding nucleotide sequences are missing.

The goal of this thesis is to. collect all nucleotide sequences for the protein sequences in SYSTERS and store them in a common database. There are two cases. The first case is that if the nucleotide sequences can …

Separation Of Ssl Protocol Phases Across Process Boundaries, Kirthikar Anantharam

Theses

Secure Sockets Layer is the de-facto standard used in the industry today for secure communications through web sites. An SSL connection is established by performing a Handshake, which is followed by the Record phase. While the SSL Handshake is computationally intensive and can cause of bottlenecks on an application server, the Record phase can cause similar bottlenecks while encrypting large volumes of data.

SSL Accelerators have been used to improve the performance of SSL-based application servers. These devices are expensive, complex to configure and inflexible to customizations. By separating the SSL Handshake and the Record phases into separate software processes, …

Smart Home Technology For Aging, Fareedh Meeran

Theses

The majority of the growing population, in the US and the rest of the world requires some degree of formal and or informal care either due to the loss of function or failing health as a result of aging and most of them suffer from chronic disorders. The cost and burden of caring for elders is steadily increasing. This thesis focuses on providing the analysis of the technologies with which a Smart Home is built to improve the quality of life of the elderly. A great deal of emphasis is given to the sensor technologies that are the back bone …

Finding Role Errors Of The Ncit Gene Hierarchy Using The Ncbi, Marc Oren

Theses

Due to the knowledge discovery process of gene information, details such as organism and chromosomal location should be known. Furthermore, the extensive biomedical research in genomics led to discovery of processes and diseases in which a gene plays a role. In the Gene hierarchy of the NCI Thesaurus (NCIT) such knowledge is represented by appropriate roles. However, upon review of the Gene hierarchy of the NCIT, many role errors are found. Realizing that such details are provided by another knowledge repository of NIH, the NCBI gene database, a methodology is presented to use NCBI to discover role errors for the …

The Effects Of Limited Rebuild Buffer And Track Buffers On Rebuild Time In Raid5, Chintan Shah

Theses

Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) are very popular for creating large, reliable storage systems. A RAID array consists of multiple independent disks that achieve fault tolerance by parity coding. The contents on a failed disk can be reconstructed on demand by reading and exciusive-ORing the corresponding blocks on surviving disks. Upon disk failure, the array enters rebuild mode when it begins to systematically reconstruct the data of the failed disk on a spare disk, provided one is available. The fundamental element of rebuild is the Rebuild Unit (RU).

Surviving disks engaged in rebuild, process user requests at a higher …

Dynamic Recomposition Of Documents From Distributed Data Sources, Abhishek Verma

Theses

Dynamic recomposition of documents refers to the process of on-the-fly creation of documents. A document can be generated from several documents that are stored at distributed data sites. The source can be queried and results obtained in the form of XML. These XML documents can be combined after a series of transformation operations to obtain the target document. The resultant document can be stored statically or in the form of a command, which can be invoked later to recompose this document dynamically. Also, in case a change is made to a document, then only the change can be stored, instead …

Biosorption Of Priority Pollutants Of Petroleum Refinery Wastewater, Deen Adnan Sheikha

Theses

Heavy metals and organic materials pollution in the aquatic system have become a serious threat today. Zinc, phenol and naphthalene are common environmental contaminants. The fate and transport of these chemicals must be sufficiently understood to predict detrimental environmental impacts and to develop technically and economically appropriate remedial action to minimize environmental degradation. In this study, microbial biomass has emerged as an option for developing economic wastewater treatment. Dead algal biomass may passively sequester metals and organic materials by the process of biosorption from dilute solutions, where biomass functions as an ion exchanger by virtue of various reactive groups available …

Model Driven Architecture - A Tool For Enterprise Architecture : A Look At Emergency Response Systems, Ritu Lamba

Theses

Today's fast changing markets and technology drive software industry to deliver high quality enterprise software solutions. The enterprise system architecture should be designed to keep business functions separate from technological implementation to accommodate the fast changing business environment.

In this thesis we have studied the current best practices in defining enterprise architectures and Zachman's framework in particular. We have further examined the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach and its application to enterprise architecture definition. MDA separates the business logic from the underlying platform technology and defines a representation model based on precise semantics. Zachman's framework defines a set of views …

Classifying Rna Secondary Structures Using Support Vector Machines, Prathy Usha Sunkara

Theses

In contrast to DNA, RNA prevails as a single strand. As a consequence of small self-complementary regions, RNA commonly exhibits an intricate secondary structure, consisting of relatively short, double helical segments alternated with single stranded regions. The amount of sequence data available is rising rapidly day by day. One of the problems encountered on a specific molecule is finding the relevant data between the massive number of other sequences to be done by reading lists with a short description of all new entries in large databases already existing. One of the main objectives of this work is to take the …

Classifying Malicious Windows Executables Using Anomaly Based Detection, Ronak Sutaria

Theses

A malicious executable is broadly defined as any program or piece of code designed to cause damage to a system or the information it contains, or to prevent the system from being used in a normal manner. A generic term used to describe any kind of malicious software is Maiware, which includes Viruses, Worms, Trojans, Backdoors, Root-kits, Spyware and Exploits. Anomaly detection is technique which builds a statistical profile of the normal and malicious data and classifies unseen data based on these two profiles.

A detection system is presented here which is anomaly based and focuses on the Windows® platform. …

A New Approach To Feature Extraction For Rna Structure Comparision, Girish Prakash Walawalkar

Theses

In recent years, RNA structural comparison becomes a crucial problem in bioinformatics research. Generally, it is a popular approach for representing the RNA secondary structures with arc-annotation sets. Several methods can be used to compare two RNA structures, such as tree edit distance, longest arc-preserving common subsequence (LAPCS) and stem based alignment. However, these methods may be helpful only for small RNA structures because of their high time complexity. In this thesis, we propose a simplified method to compare two RNA structures in O(mn) time, where m and n are the lengths of the two RNA sequences, respectively. The method …

Solvent Targeting, Avoidance And Recovery Trials (Start), Kealan Allen

Theses

Solvent is the largest-volume raw material used at Janssen Pharmaceutical (Ire) Ltd. Over 2.2 million m³ were used in 2004. The top 13 solvents make up 99% of this amount. There are two main uses for solvent on site, processing and cleaning. Processing uses 55% of the total solvent used on site, cleaning uses the remainder.

Waste solvent forms the majority of the hazardous waste produced at Janssen. Three treatment options exist at present for this waste: incineration, recovery for reuse and energy recovery. All of the hazardous waste produced on site must be exported for these treatment options, …

Evolutionary Algorithms For Production Scheduling, Pio Fenton

Theses

The permutation with repetition representation is a powerful representation primarily used in the GA-JSSP domain. Recently, attention has shifted from this representation for simple GA and towards JSSP resolution using messy GA. This work returns to the permutation with repetition representation for simple GA with the intention of exploring some previously unexplored aspects. A new 1-point crossover operator is introduced which is shown to be more successful than the current standard operator for this representation. A technique known as morphogenic computation is employed with this representation for the first time and a thorough analysis of its performance is presented. While …

Electronic Mathematics, Aidan O'Donoghue

Theses

Recent times have seen an explosion in the use of interactive technologies in the delivery of learning content to students in all educational sectors in Ireland. This expansion has led to the creation of modem day phenomenons such as global and ‘teacherless’ classrooms.

The research study I have undertaken is to determine if students perform to the same standard when learning through an interactive educational software application as opposed to a more traditional setting of learning ’through’ a teacher in a classroom. The application being developed for this study enables students to learn the ordinary level leaving certificate mathematics course …

Development Of A Service-Oriented Communication Platform For Heterogeneous Voice Over Ip Networks., Aisling O'Driscoll

Theses

As broadband services have become more widespread in recent years due to a variety of government initiatives and the establishment of Wireless Internet Service Providers, user requirements have evolved and the market has become more competitive. Whilst this is beneficial for consumers it means that Internet Service Providers must offer a more diverse range of services coupled with standard broadband packages to distinguish themselves from their competitors, generate new revenue and strengthen their competitive advantage. Therefore many providers are looking to Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) to provide communication platforms, enabling services such as Voice over IP (VoIP) along with other …

Zero Effluent Stretch Target (Zest), Orla O'Connor

Theses

The goals of this project were to assess the viability of avoiding water use and of “cascading” water uses, i.e. using outlet water from one process in another activity, possibly with some purification, including the upgrading of the final effluent stream for internal reuse. Water use has been inventoried at FMC Biopolymer, Cork. Avoidance and reduction measures were identified that could reduce water consumption from 49m /hr to 19 m /hr (a reduction in excess of 60%), with an annual saving in excess of €350,000. These projects were assessed for feasibility and implementation. Potential streams that could be subject to …

Assessment Of The Effectiveness Of Available Pollution Control Technologies In Reducing Phenol Level At Enoc Refinery Wastewater Treatment Plant, Waddah Shihab Ghanim Al Hashemi

Theses

Phenols are present in discharge effluents of many heavy industries such as refineries. They are regulated and monitored by environmental authorities. Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC) processes condensate oil and produces wastewater that is treated at the ENOC Processing Company's (EPCL-refinery) wastewater treatment plant (ETP) through the use of physical, chemical and biological treatment processes. This study provides an in-depth description of the unit processes employed to treat the different waste streams generated at the EPCL refinery and identifies the different types of phenols which are formulated in the processes. Characterization of phenol level at EPCL-ETP and assessment of the …

Synthesis Of Some Pyridinone Nucleoside Analogues As Antitumor Agents, Shaikha Saif Saeed Alneyadi

Theses

Abstract

3-Deazapyrimidine nucleosides have been shown to exhibit great potential as pro drug for use in medicine especially as antagonists to cancer tumors and the HIV-virus. Recent research has focused on the design, synthesis and characterization of novel nucleoside analogues.

Fluoropyridinone and their corresponding nucleoside derivatives have been synthesized and characterized to induce the activity against tumors. 4, 6-diaryl-3-cyano-2(1H)-pyridinones (82a-i) and their nucleosides were prepared. A trifluoromethyl group was introduced into the pyridinone ring system to study its effect on different tumor cells. The glycoside analogues (83a-e, 85a-e, 87a-e and 88a-d) have been synthesized …

Development Of Electroanalytical Methods For The Determination Of Sialic Acid As A Biomarker For Cancer, Khawla Ali Rashid Al-Tayyari

Theses

Sialic acid (SA) is a general term for a family composed of 43 derivatives of neuraminic acid. Whereas N-acetylneuraminic acid (NANA) is the most commonly occurring sialic acid in human. There has been a great interest in the determination of SA in humans because variations in SA level was linked to different medical conditions and diseases. In particular, serum SA are elevated in several types of cancers. SA also exists in Erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone, which induces the production of red blood cells and hence used in the treatment of anemia.

Although of the great physiological significance of SA …

Effects Of Medicinal Plants On Lead Induced Toxicity Of Biotransformation And Redox Cycling Enzymes, Yusra Saif Khalfan Al Dhaheri

Theses

All organisms including humans are constantly and unavoidably exposed to foreign chemicals (xenobiotics), which include both manufactured and natural molecules such as pollutants and plant metabolites. One such alarming pollutant is lead as it is constantly produced from automobiles exhaust products and food containers. It has been documented that lead, as the major heavy metal pollutant in the air, has notable effects on nervous systems and efficiency of several enzymes.

There are some natural products such as medicinal plants that might have antagonistic effects against such pollutants. Several medicinal plants are used as traditional remedies for many ailments without knowing …

A Study Of Factors Influencing The Occurrence Of Algae Bloom (Hab) Along The Abu Dhabi Coast, Uae., Buthaina Salem Saeed Al Qubaisi

Theses

During last few years, the frequency of Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) has increased worldwide. The occurrence of HAB in the Gulf region has only recently been recorded in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Specifically, these occurrences have not been thoroughly investigated. This phenomena, was found to be associated with the increase in nutrient load, depletion of oxygen and a significant decrease in fish populations that is caused by a bloom of a certain phytoplankton species, results in economic and social problems. Therefore, the Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi (EAD) has decided to conduct a study on different aspects of this phenomenon of …

Date Palm (Phoenix Dactylifera L.) Tissue Culture: Type Of Contamination And Improvement Of Disinfestation Techniques, Mouza Nasser Al-Shamisi

Theses

Date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) cultivation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is considered one of the most important economic supports for the agricultural sector. Propagation of date palm by offshoots cannot satisfy the increasing demand of date palm trees, and high propagation rate can only be achieved using tissue culture techniques. However, one of the major problems of this technique is the failure of producing aseptic cultures, yielding to the loss of the explants at the initiation phase.

The objectives of this study were to develop a reliable disinfection technique of date palm explants at the initiation …

Effects Of Novel Synthetic Nucleosides As Anti-Tumor Agents On Human Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia Cell Line (Hl-60), Salma Awad Merghani Mahmoud

Theses

Nucleosides and their analogs are considered a clinically proven class of therapeutic agents possessing anticancer and antiviral activity. Several trifluoromethyl-substituted pyrazole N-nucleosides (coded NIA, NIIA and NIIA) and their nucleobases were synthesized and tested for the ability to induce apoptosis in acute human promyelocytic cell line (HL-60). The growth and proliferation of HL-60 was more effectively inhibited by NIA, NIIA and their nucleobases compared to NIIIA and its nucleobase. In addition, DNA fragmentation was detected in a concentration-dependent manner as a result of nucleosides treatment. A caspase-3-dependent apoptosis was observed based on the Western blot analysis of poly-ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) …

Expression Of Tumor Suppressor Genes During Breast Cancer Progression In The Rat, Wafa Saqer Rashid Abdullah Aldhaheri

Theses

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer and the leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United Arab Emirates and all over the world. Although many factors contribute to the high incidence of breast cancer, a considerable number of cases are related to environmental factors. In this study, breast cancer was induced in female rats using a single dose, 80 mg/kg body wt, of the environmental carcinogen 7,12- dimethylbenz[a]anthracene (DMBA). The aim was to characterize some of the early cellular and molecular changes that occur during breast cancer development in the DMBA-treated rat model. Mammary gland …