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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Estimation For The Cox Model With Various Types Of Censored Data, Tonya Riddlesworth Jan 2011

Estimation For The Cox Model With Various Types Of Censored Data, Tonya Riddlesworth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In survival analysis, the Cox model is one of the most widely used tools. However, up to now there has not been any published work on the Cox model with complicated types of censored data, such as doubly censored data, partly-interval censored data, etc., while these types of censored data have been encountered in important medical studies, such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. In this dissertation, we first derive the bivariate nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (BNPMLE) F[subscript n](t,z) for joint distribution function F[sub 0](t,z) of survival time T and covariate Z, where T is subject to right censoring, noting …


Modeling Human Group Behavior In Virtual Worlds, Fahad Shah Jan 2011

Modeling Human Group Behavior In Virtual Worlds, Fahad Shah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Virtual worlds and massively-multiplayer online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. They provide new outlets for human social interaction that differ from both face-to-face interactions and non-physically-embodied social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. We aim to study group dynamics in these virtual worlds by collecting and analyzing public conversational patterns of users grouped in close physical proximity. To do this, we created a set of tools for monitoring, partitioning, and analyzing unstructured conversations between changing groups of participants …


Hückel Energy Of A Graph: Its Evolution From Quantum Chemistry To Mathematics, Steven Zimmerman Jan 2011

Hückel Energy Of A Graph: Its Evolution From Quantum Chemistry To Mathematics, Steven Zimmerman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The energy of a graph began with German physicist, Erich H¨uckel’s 1931 paper, Quantenttheoretische Beitr¨age zum Benzolproblem. His work developed a method for computing the binding energy of the π-electrons for a certain class of organic molecules. The vertices of the graph represented the carbon atoms while the single edge between each pair of distinct vertices represented the hydrogen bonds between the carbon atoms. In turn, the chemical graphs were represented by an n × n matrix used in solving Schr¨odinger’s eigenvalue/eigenvector equation. The sum of the absolute values of these graph eigenvalues represented the total π-electron energy. The criteria …


Techniques For Boosting The Performance In Content-Based Image Retrieval Systems, Ning Yu Jan 2011

Techniques For Boosting The Performance In Content-Based Image Retrieval Systems, Ning Yu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Content-Based Image Retrieval has been an active research area for decades. In a CBIR system, one or more images are used as query to search for similar images. The similarity is measured on the low level features, such as color, shape, edge, texture. First, each image is processed and visual features are extract. Therefore each image becomes a point in the feature space. Then, if two images are close to each other in the feature space, they are considered similar. That is, the k nearest neighbors are considered the most similar images to the query image. In this K-Nearest Neighbor …


Harmony Oriented Architecture, Kyle A. Martin Jan 2011

Harmony Oriented Architecture, Kyle A. Martin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents Harmony Oriented Architecture: a novel architectural paradigm that applies the principles of Harmony Oriented Programming to the architecture of scalable and evolvable distributed systems. It is motivated by research on Ultra Large Scale systems that has revealed inherent limitations in human ability to design large-scale software systems that can only be overcome through radical alternatives to traditional object-oriented software engineering practice that simplifies the construction of highly scalable and evolvable system. HOP eschews encapsulation and information hiding, the core principles of objectoriented design, in favor of exposure and information sharing through a spatial abstraction. This helps to …


Prediction Of Survival Of Early Stages Lung Cancer Patients Based On Er Beta Cellular Expressions And Epidemiological Data, Evgeny Martinenko Jan 2011

Prediction Of Survival Of Early Stages Lung Cancer Patients Based On Er Beta Cellular Expressions And Epidemiological Data, Evgeny Martinenko

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We attempted a mathematical model for expected prognosis of lung cancer patients based on a multivariate analysis of the values of ER-interacting proteins (ERbeta) and a membrane bound, glycosylated phosphoprotein MUC1), and patients clinical data recorded at the time of initial surgery. We demonstrate that, even with the limited sample size available to use, combination of clinical and biochemical data (in particular, associated with ERbeta and MUC1) allows to predict survival of lung cancer patients with about 80% accuracy while prediction on the basis of clinical data only gives about 70% accuracy. The present work can be viewed as a …


The Implications Of Virtual Environments In Digital Forensic Investigations, Farrah M. Patterson Jan 2011

The Implications Of Virtual Environments In Digital Forensic Investigations, Farrah M. Patterson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research paper discusses the role of virtual environments in digital forensic investigations. With virtual environments becoming more prevalent as an analysis tool in digital forensic investigations, it’s becoming more important for digital forensic investigators to understand the limitation and strengths of virtual machines. The study aims to expose limitations within commercial closed source virtual machines and open source virtual machines. The study provides a brief overview of history digital forensic investigations and virtual environments, and concludes with an experiment with four common open and closed source virtual machines; the effects of the virtual machines on the host machine as …


Characterization Of Composite Broad Band Absorbing Conjugated Polymer Nanoparticles Using Steady-State, Time-Resolve And Single Particle Spectroscopy, Maxwell Scotland Bonner Jan 2011

Characterization Of Composite Broad Band Absorbing Conjugated Polymer Nanoparticles Using Steady-State, Time-Resolve And Single Particle Spectroscopy, Maxwell Scotland Bonner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the global economy searches for reliable, inexpensive and environmentally friendly renewable energy resources, energy conservation by means of photovoltaics has seen near exponential growth in the last decade. Compared to state-of-the-art inorganic solar cells, organic photovoltaics (OPVs) composed of conjugated polymers are particularly interesting because of their processability, flexibility and the potential for large area devices at a reduced fabrication cost. It has been extensively documented that the interchain and intrachain interactions of conjugated polymers complicate the fundamental understanding of the optical and electronic properties in the solid-state (i.e. thin film active layer). These interactions are highly dependent on …


Ultra High Density Spectral Beam Combining By Thermal Tuning Of Volume Bragg Gratings In Photo-Thermo-Refractive Glass, Derrek Drachenberg Jan 2011

Ultra High Density Spectral Beam Combining By Thermal Tuning Of Volume Bragg Gratings In Photo-Thermo-Refractive Glass, Derrek Drachenberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

High power lasers with diffraction limited beam quality are desired for many applications in defense and manufacturing. A lot of applications require laser beams at the 100 kW power level along with divergence close to the diffraction limit. The figure of merit for a beam used in such applications should be radiance which determines the laser power delivered to a remote target. One of the primary limiting factors is thermal distortion of a laser beam caused by excessive heat generated in the laser media. Combination of multiple laser beams is usually considered as a method to mitigate these limitations. Spectral …


Theoretical Study Of Beam Transformations By Volume Diffraction, Sergiy V. Mokhov Jan 2011

Theoretical Study Of Beam Transformations By Volume Diffraction, Sergiy V. Mokhov

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Laser beams can be manipulated by volume diffractive elements in addition to conventional optical elements like mirrors, lenses, and beam splitters. Conventional optical elements can be described by applying the basic laws of reflection and refraction at the surfaces of the elements. Even diffraction by surface gratings utilizes relatively simple mathematics. This is to be contrasted with the volume diffraction, which requires coupled wave theory in the slowly varying envelope approximation (SVEA) to obtain accurate results. Efficient spatially distributed diffraction of laser beams is possible due to the high coherence of laser light, and it occurs at specific resonant Bragg …


Density Functional Theory Study Of Molecules And Crystals Containing D And F Metals, Shruba Gangopadhyay Jan 2011

Density Functional Theory Study Of Molecules And Crystals Containing D And F Metals, Shruba Gangopadhyay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Density Functional Theory (DFT) method is applied to study the crystal structure of transition metal and lanthanide oxides, as well as molecular magnetic complexes. DFT is a widely popular computational approach because it recasts a many-body problem of interacting electrons into an equivalent problem of non-interacting electrons, greatly reducing computational cost. We show that for certain structural properties like phase stability, lattice parameter and oxygen migration energetics pure DFT can give good agreement with experiments. But moving to more sensitive properties like spin state energetic certain modifications of standard DFT are needed. First we investigated mixed ionic-electronic conducting perovskite type …


High Pressure And Micro-Spectroscopic Studies Of Single Living Erythrocytes And The Intraerythrocytic Multplication Cycle Of Plasmodium Falciparum, Silki Arora Jan 2011

High Pressure And Micro-Spectroscopic Studies Of Single Living Erythrocytes And The Intraerythrocytic Multplication Cycle Of Plasmodium Falciparum, Silki Arora

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A novel experimental approach for micro-absorption spectroscopy and high-pressure microscopy of single cells is developed and applied to the investigation of morphological, volume, and spectroscopic changes in healthy red blood cells (RBCs) and erythrocytes infected with the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Through real-time optical imaging of individual erythrocytes (size ~ 7[micrometer]) we determine the change in volume over the pressure range from 0.1 to 210 MPa. The lateral diameter of healthy RBCs decreases reversibly with pressure with an approximate slope of 0.015 [micrometer] / MPa. In infected cells, clear differences in the deformability and between the compression and decompression curves …


Self-Assembly And Photophysics Of Selected Organic Materials And Two-Photon Bioimaging With Profluorescent Nitroxides, Polyelectrolyte Nanoparticles, And Squaraine Probes, Hyo Yang Ahn Jan 2011

Self-Assembly And Photophysics Of Selected Organic Materials And Two-Photon Bioimaging With Profluorescent Nitroxides, Polyelectrolyte Nanoparticles, And Squaraine Probes, Hyo Yang Ahn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Two-photon absorption and upconverted fluorescence has been utilized in a variety of applications in pure science and engineering. Multiphoton-based techniques were used in this research in order to understand photophysical and chemical characteristics of several fluorescent dyes and to demonstrate some of their key applications. Two-photon fluorescence microscopy (2PFM) has become a powerful technique in bio-photonics for non-invasive imaging in the near-infrared (NIR) region (700~1000 nm) that often results in less photobleaching. In Chapter 1, there is a brief introduction to fluorescence, examples of fluorescence materials, and a discussion of the advantages of two-photon absorption. 2PFM imaging was utilized in …


Characterization Of The Nonlinear Refractive Index Of Carbon Disulfide Over An Extended Spectral And Temporal Range, Marcus Seidel Jan 2011

Characterization Of The Nonlinear Refractive Index Of Carbon Disulfide Over An Extended Spectral And Temporal Range, Marcus Seidel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The intensity dependent refractive index change of a medium is frequently described in terms of the product n₂ · I where n₂ is the nonlinear refractive index and I the light intensity. The nonlinear refractive index is often treated as constant which is a reasonable assumption if the light interacts only with bound electrons. In the case of carbon disulfide (CS₂) however, nuclear motions contribute to n₂. These motions occur on the sub picosecond time scale and thus become especially relevant for ultrashort laser pulses. The neat liquid CS₂ is studied because it exhibits a large nonlinear refractive index in …


An Approach To Improve The Failure Rate Model Of A Solid State Laser By Utalizing The Physics Of Failure Methodology, Omar L. Thompson Jan 2011

An Approach To Improve The Failure Rate Model Of A Solid State Laser By Utalizing The Physics Of Failure Methodology, Omar L. Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ability to predict the failure rate of any military laser is very critical. In-field laser usage does not support the troubleshooting and repairing of a complex electro optical system. The only published laser failure rate model was last updated by the Department of Defense in 1975. Consequently, the failure rate predicted is inaccurate due to model deficiencies. This dissertation has developed a laser failure rate model for diode pumped lasers with improved failure rate prediction accuracy. The model has surpassed the capabilities of the Department of Defense model by the inclusion of key performance attributes that are currently not …


Innovative Pollutant Load Monitoring, Eric Gurr Jan 2011

Innovative Pollutant Load Monitoring, Eric Gurr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Modern streamflow measuring equipment, water quality sampling techniques and a better understanding of pollutant washoff are continuously being developed as today's society is in critical need of improving water management, minimizing developmental impacts and preventing environmental hazards. In particular, the study of the spatial, temporal and volumetric characteristics of annual pollutant loading caused by variations in precipitation, land use and other anthropogenic factors is of great significance due to their relation to future global water demands. The research presented here falls in three parts. In the first part of the dissertation, an acoustical Doppler velocity profiler installed in a submerged …


Computational Study Of The Near Field Spontaneous Creation Of Photonic States Coupled To Few Level Systems, Sergio Tafur Jan 2011

Computational Study Of The Near Field Spontaneous Creation Of Photonic States Coupled To Few Level Systems, Sergio Tafur

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Models of the spontaneous emission and absorption of photons coupled to the electronic states of quantum dots, molecules, N-V (single nitrogen vacancy) centers in diamond, that can be modeled as artificial few level atoms, are important to the development of quantum computers and quantum networks. A quantum source modeled after an effective few level system is strongly dependent on the type and coupling strength the allowed transitions. These selection rules are subject to the Wigner-Eckert theorem which specifies the possible transitions during the spontaneous creation of a photonic state and its subsequent emission. The model presented in this dissertation describes …


Infrared Emission Spectroscopy Of Hot Carbon Monoxide, Farnood Khalilzadeh Rezaie Jan 2011

Infrared Emission Spectroscopy Of Hot Carbon Monoxide, Farnood Khalilzadeh Rezaie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gas giant exoplanets known as hot Jupiters orbit close to their parent stars and are heated to high temperatures. Their infrared spectra, measured by photometry during secondary eclipses, are dominated by carbon monoxide and methane, the principle reservoirs of carbon on these planets. The relative CO and CH4 abundances inform us about temperature and pressure conditions and also about mixing by global winds driven by intense but asymmetric heating for these tidally locked bodies. Emission spectra collected during secondary eclipses, as the hot Jupiter passes behind its parent star, in principle allows a determination of the CO:CH4 concentration ratio. Since …


Perceptual Image Quality Of Launch Vehicle Imaging Telescopes, Joshua K. Lentz Jan 2011

Perceptual Image Quality Of Launch Vehicle Imaging Telescopes, Joshua K. Lentz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A large fleet (in the hundreds) of high quality telescopes are used for tracking and imaging of launch vehicles during ascent from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Kennedy Space Center. A maintenance tool has been development for use with these telescopes. The tool requires rankings of telescope condition in terms of the ability to generate useful imagery. It is thus a case of ranking telescope conditions on the basis of the perceptual image quality of their imagery. Perceptual image quality metrics that are well-correlated to observer opinions of image quality have been available for several decades. However, these are …


Price Discovery In The U.S. Bond Market Trading Strategies And The Cost Of Liquidity, Haimei Shao Jan 2011

Price Discovery In The U.S. Bond Market Trading Strategies And The Cost Of Liquidity, Haimei Shao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The world bond market is nearly twice as large as the equity market. The goal of this dissertation is to study the dynamics of bond price. Among the liquidity risk, interest rate risk and default risk, this dissertation will focus on the liquidity risk and trading strategy. Under the mathematical frame of stochastic control, we model price setting in U.S. bond markets where dealers have multiple instruments to smooth inventory imbalances. The difficulty in obtaining the optimal trading strategy is that the optimal strategy and value function depend on each other, and the corresponding HJB equation is nonlinear. To solve …


Fractal Spectral Measures In Two Dimensions, Beng Oscar Alrud Jan 2011

Fractal Spectral Measures In Two Dimensions, Beng Oscar Alrud

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We study spectral properties for invariant measures associated to affine iterated function systems. We present various conditions under which the existence of a Hadamard pair implies the existence of a spectrum for the fractal measure. This solves a conjecture proposed by Dorin Dutkay and Palle Jorgensen, in several special cases in dimension 2.


Single-Electron Transport Spectroscopy Studies Of Magnetic Molecules And Nanoparticles, Firoze Haque Jan 2011

Single-Electron Transport Spectroscopy Studies Of Magnetic Molecules And Nanoparticles, Firoze Haque

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Magnetic nanoparticles and molecules, in particular ferromagnetic noble metal nanoparticles, molecular magnet and single-molecule magnets (SMM), are perfect examples to investigate the role of quantum mechanics at the nanoscale. For example, SMMs are known to reverse their magnetization by quantum tunneling in the absence of thermal excitation and show a number of fundamental quantum mechanical manifestations, such as quantum interference effects. On the other hand, noble metal nanoparticles are found to behave ferromagnetically for diameters below a few nanometers. Some of these manifestations are still intriguing, and novel research approaches are necessary to advance towards a more complete understanding of …


Few-Cycle Pulses Amplification For Attosecond Science Applications Modeling And Experiments, Michael Hemmer Jan 2011

Few-Cycle Pulses Amplification For Attosecond Science Applications Modeling And Experiments, Michael Hemmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of mode-locked oscillators providing pulses with durations as short as a few electric-field cycles in the near infra-red has paved the way toward electric-field sensitive physics experiments. In addition, the control of the relative phase between the carrier and the pulse envelope, developed in the early 2000’s and rewarded by a Nobel price in 2005, now provides unprecedented control over the pulse behaviour. The amplification of such pulses to the millijoule level has been an on-going task in a few world-class laboratories and has triggered the dawn of attoscience, the science of events happening on an attosecond timescale. …


Design, Fabrication, And Testing Of High-Transparency Deep Ultra-Violet Contacts Using Surface Plasmon Coupling In Subwavelength Aluminum Meshes, Clarisse Mazuir Jan 2011

Design, Fabrication, And Testing Of High-Transparency Deep Ultra-Violet Contacts Using Surface Plasmon Coupling In Subwavelength Aluminum Meshes, Clarisse Mazuir

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present work aims at enhancing the external quantum efficiencies of ultra-violet (UV) sensitive photodetectors (PDs) and light emitting diodes (LEDs)for any light polarization. Deep UV solid state devices are made out of AlGaN or MgZnO and their performances suffer from the high resistivity of their p-doped regions. They require transparent p-contacts; yet the most commonly used transparent contacts have low transmission in the UV: indium tin oxide (ITO) and nickel-gold (Ni/Au 5/5 nms) transmit less than 50% and 30% respectively at 300 nm. Here we investigate the use of surface plasmons (SPs) to design transparent p-contacts for AlGaN devices …


The Effectiveness Of Teaching Methods Designed To Improve Student Engagement And Retention Of Physics Subject Matter For Both Science And Non-Science Majors, Dan Maronde Jan 2011

The Effectiveness Of Teaching Methods Designed To Improve Student Engagement And Retention Of Physics Subject Matter For Both Science And Non-Science Majors, Dan Maronde

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The necessity of students’ engagement with the subject matter for successful learning is welldocumented in education research in general, and in physics education research in particular. This study examines the merits of two different programs designed to improve student learning through enhanced student engagement with the material. The target populations of the two programs are different: One is the group of students taking a physical science class as part of the general curriculum required of non-science, non-engineering majors; the other is the group of students, mostly in engineering disciplines, who must take the calculus-based introductory physics sequence as part of …


Two-Photon Cross Section Enhancement Of Photochromic Compounds For Use In 3d Optical Data Storage, Gheorghe Luchita Jan 2011

Two-Photon Cross Section Enhancement Of Photochromic Compounds For Use In 3d Optical Data Storage, Gheorghe Luchita

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rewritable photochrome-based 3D optical data storage requires photochromic molecules with high two-photon absorption (2PA) cross sections. Currently, the low value of two-photon absorption cross sections of existing photochromes makes them unsuitable for practical application in 3D data storage. Worldwide attempts to increase the cross section of photochromic molecules by altering the chemical structure have yielded poor results. In this work, two ways to increase the two-photon absorption cross sections of photochromes were investigated. In the first method, partial success demonstrated by extending the conjugation of a photochromic molecule, a high two-photon absorption cross section of the closed form isomer and …


Algebraic Aspects Of (Bio) Nano-Chemical Reaction Networks And Bifurcations In Various Dynamical Systems, Teng Chen Jan 2011

Algebraic Aspects Of (Bio) Nano-Chemical Reaction Networks And Bifurcations In Various Dynamical Systems, Teng Chen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dynamics of (bio) chemical reaction networks have been studied by different methods. Among these methods, the chemical reaction network theory has been proven to successfully predicate important qualitative properties, such as the existence of the steady state and the asymptotic behavior of the steady state. However, a constructive approach to the steady state locus has not been presented. In this thesis, with the help of toric geometry, we propose a generic strategy towards this question. This theory is applied to (bio)nano particle configurations. We also investigate Hopf bifurcation surfaces of various dynamical systems.


Self-Assembly Of Squaraine Dyes, Maher A. Qaddoura Jan 2011

Self-Assembly Of Squaraine Dyes, Maher A. Qaddoura

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Squaraine dyes have been a subject of extensive investigations lately due to their wide applications in important technological fields such as bioimaging probes, bioconjucation, second generation photosensitizers for photodynamic therapy, second harmonic generating organic dyes, two-photon absorbing materials with large cross section values, and, finally, photoconducting materials in photovoltaic cells. While a large number of patents and papers has been produced regarding their applications limited work has been done concerning their thermotropic behavior, including their liquid crystalline properties, or correlation of the crystalline structure to both the solid state aggregation and their photophysical properties. In the first chapter of this …


The Application Of Two-Photon Absorbing Probes In Lysosomal, Zinc Ion Sensing And Folate Receptor-Targeted Bioimaging, Xuhua Wang Jan 2011

The Application Of Two-Photon Absorbing Probes In Lysosomal, Zinc Ion Sensing And Folate Receptor-Targeted Bioimaging, Xuhua Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Two-photon fluorescence microscopy (2PFM) has become a powerful technique for bioimaging in non-invasive cancer diagnosis and also investigating the mechanization and original of a variety of diseases by tracking various biological processes. Because the fluorescence emission by two photon absorbing (2PA) is directly proportional to the square of the intensity of excitation light, this intrinsic property of 2PA provides 2PFM great advantages over traditional one-photon fluorescence microscopy (1PFM), including high 3D spatial localization, less photodamage and interference from biological tissue because of using longer wavelength excitation (700-1300 nm). However, most 2PA probes are hydrophobic and their photostabilities are questionable, severely …


Multilayered Planar Periodic Subwavelength Microstructures For Generating And Detecting Circularly Polarized Thermal Infrared Radiation, Samuel Lanning Wadsworth Jan 2011

Multilayered Planar Periodic Subwavelength Microstructures For Generating And Detecting Circularly Polarized Thermal Infrared Radiation, Samuel Lanning Wadsworth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Generation and detection of circularly-polarized (CP) radiation in the 8- to 12-μm band of the infrared (IR) spectrum is crucial for polarization sensing and imaging scenarios. There is very little naturally occurring CP radiation in the long-wave IR band, so that useful functionalities may be obtained by exploiting preferential radiation and transmission characteristics of engineered metamaterials. Conventional CP devices in the IR utilize birefringent crystals, which are typically bulky and expensive to manufacture. The operation of these devices is generally optimized at a single wavelength. Imaging in the long-wave IR is most often broadband, so that achromatic CP-device behavior is …