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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Theoretical Estimation Of PkA'S Of Pyrimidines And Related Heterocycles, Rachael Ann Wessner Jan 2016

Theoretical Estimation Of PkA'S Of Pyrimidines And Related Heterocycles, Rachael Ann Wessner

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Pyrimidines and related heterocycles are an important class of compounds with a wide variety of applications. As a result, there is great interest in the chemical properties of these compounds, specifically their pKa's. Despite the importance of these compounds their reported pKa's are often only approximations or are completely absent from literature. Experimentally measuring pKa's can be challenging, especially if the pKa is below zero. Alternatively, pKa's can be estimated computationally using a Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR). However, most of the compounds included in this study exist as two or more forms that arise from tautomerism. Tautomerism complicates the estimation …


Towards Best Practices For Crowdsourcing Ontology Alignment Benchmarks, Reihaneh Amini Jan 2016

Towards Best Practices For Crowdsourcing Ontology Alignment Benchmarks, Reihaneh Amini

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Ontology alignment systems establish the semantic links between ontologies that enable knowledge from various sources and domains to be used by automated applications in many different ways. Unfortunately, these systems are not perfect. Currently, the results of even the best-performing automated alignment systems need to be manually verified in order to be fully trusted. Ontology alignment researchers have turned to crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk to accomplish this. However, there has been little systematic analysis of the accuracy of crowdsourcing for alignment verification and the establishment of best practices. In this work, we analyze the impact of the …


An Investigation Of The Adsorption Behavior Between Silver Nanoparticles (Agnps) And Corundum (Α-Al2O3) At Environmental Ph Values Using Inductively-Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (Icp-Oes) And Raman Spectroscopy, Kevin Andrew O'Neil Jan 2016

An Investigation Of The Adsorption Behavior Between Silver Nanoparticles (Agnps) And Corundum (Α-Al2O3) At Environmental Ph Values Using Inductively-Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (Icp-Oes) And Raman Spectroscopy, Kevin Andrew O'Neil

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With the increased use of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) in consumer products, the need to monitor their release into environmental soils has become critical. Although minerals make up a large component of soils, research on their interactions with AgNPs is still limited. Furthermore, the majority of the existing research focused on silica-based minerals rather than metal oxides, which is the second most abundant mineral type in the earth's crust. This study examined for the first time the aqueous interaction between the widely used, spherical Creighton AgNPs and a-corundum (a-Al2O3), a representative non-silica-based mineral, at environmentally relevant pH values (6-11). Samples were …


Mining And Analyzing Subjective Experiences In User Generated Content, Lu Chen Jan 2016

Mining And Analyzing Subjective Experiences In User Generated Content, Lu Chen

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Web 2.0 and social media enable people to create, share and discover information instantly anywhere, anytime. A great amount of this information is subjective information -- the information about people's subjective experiences, ranging from feelings of what is happening in our daily lives to opinions on a wide variety of topics. Subjective information is useful to individuals, businesses, and government agencies to support decision making in areas such as product purchase, marketing strategy, and policy making. However, much useful subjective information is buried in ever-growing user generated data on social media platforms, it is still difficult to extract high quality …


Knowledge-Driven Implicit Information Extraction, Pathirage Dinindu Perera Jan 2016

Knowledge-Driven Implicit Information Extraction, Pathirage Dinindu Perera

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Natural language is a powerful tool developed by humans over hundreds of thousands of years. The extensive usage, flexibility of the language, creativity of the human beings, and social, cultural, and economic changes that have taken place in daily life have added new constructs, styles, and features to the language. One such feature of the language is its ability to express ideas, opinions, and facts in an implicit manner. This is a feature that is used extensively in day to day communications in situations such as: 1) expressing sarcasm, 2) when trying to recall forgotten things, 3) when required to …


Identifying Tweets With Implicit Entity Mentions, Adarsh Koruthu Alex Jan 2016

Identifying Tweets With Implicit Entity Mentions, Adarsh Koruthu Alex

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Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have become a significant source of user-generated content in the past decade. Mining of this user-generated content has proved beneficial for a broad range of applications like Event Extraction, Document Retrieval, and Sentiment Analysis. Identifying entities is one of the major tasks that fuel important information for above tasks. Identification of entities is typically performed in two steps; Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Linking. State of the art NER solutions focus on recognizing the entities that are mentioned explicitly in social media posts. However, entities are frequently mentioned implicitly in them. For …


Framework For Semantic Integration And Scalable Processing Of City Traffic Events, Surendra Brahma Marupudi Jan 2016

Framework For Semantic Integration And Scalable Processing Of City Traffic Events, Surendra Brahma Marupudi

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Intelligent traffic management requires analysis of a large volume of multimodal data from diverse domains. For the development of intelligent traffic applications, we need to address diversity in observations from physical sensors which give weather, traffic flow, parking information; we also need to do the same with social media, which provides live commentary of various events in a city. The extraction of relevant events and the semantic integration of numeric values from sensors, unstructured text from Twitter, and semi- structured data from city authorities is a challenging physical-cyber-social data integration problem. In order to address the challenge of both scalability …


Design And Application Of Facile Routes To N-Heterocycle Functionalized Poly(Arylene Ether)S, Abraham K. Kemboi Jan 2016

Design And Application Of Facile Routes To N-Heterocycle Functionalized Poly(Arylene Ether)S, Abraham K. Kemboi

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A series of 3,5-difluorinated systems, which are activated towards nucleophilic aromatic substitution (NAS) by the strongly electron withdrawing benzoxazole or benzothiazole groups, located meta to the fluorines were prepared and fully characterized. The monomers also carry various N-heterocyclic species on the non-fluorinated ring. The corresponding poly(arylene ether)s, some of which were copolymers with triphenylphosphine oxide-based monomers, were prepared via standard NAS polycondensation reactions. Incorporation of the monomers containing N-heterocycle units was determined by NMR spectroscopy. Characterization of the thermal properties was done using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential scanning (DSC). Most of the polymers displayed good film forming properties when …


Millimeter – Wave/Terahertz Chirped Michelson Interferometer Techniques For Sub Surface Sensing, Dinesh Amal Mirando Jan 2016

Millimeter – Wave/Terahertz Chirped Michelson Interferometer Techniques For Sub Surface Sensing, Dinesh Amal Mirando

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Over the last couple of decades, the field of millimeter-wave (mmW) and terahertz (THz) radiation has seen an accelerated growth thanks to developments in high quality mmW/THz sensors. These developments have contributed to many useful applications in the fields of medicine, security, construction, etc. Non-destructive evaluations such as the detection of defects in materials is currently one of the major applications of mmW/THz radiation. These evaluations are performed using mmW/THz continuous-wave radar systems. In this study, we discuss how Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) techniques can enhance sensing applications through the use of a Michelson interferometer. This allows multiple objects …


Convergent Evolution In Tooth Morphology Of Filter Feeding Lamniform Sharks, Michaela Grace Mitchell Jan 2016

Convergent Evolution In Tooth Morphology Of Filter Feeding Lamniform Sharks, Michaela Grace Mitchell

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The basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) and megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios) are two species of filter feeding sharks, both belonging to the order Lamniformes. There are two conflicting hypotheses regarding the origins of filter feeding in Lamniform sharks; that there is a single origin of filter feeding within Lamniformes, or conversely, the filter feeding adaptations have been developed independently due to different ancestral conditions. Evidence obtained from several studies strongly supports the latter hypothesis. Because evidence suggests that C. maximus and M. pelagios have developed their filter feeding adaptations independently, we expect to see convergent evolution taking place within these two …


Miniatured Inertial Motion And Position Tracking And Visualization Systems Using Android Wear Platform, Dhruvkumar Navinchandra Patel Jan 2016

Miniatured Inertial Motion And Position Tracking And Visualization Systems Using Android Wear Platform, Dhruvkumar Navinchandra Patel

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In this thesis, we have designed and developed a motion tracking and visualization system using the latest motion tracking sensory technologies. It is one of the enabling technologies for our novel visual-inertial odometer and human anatomy based 3D Locating, Mapping and Navigation system for endoscopy and drug delivery capsules used inside GI tract. In particular, we have: i) designed and completed a cloud-based sensory data collecting, processing and storage system to provide the reliable computing and storage platform; ii) explored different data processing methods to obtain improved-quality motion results from extremely noisy raw data, e.g., by using a low pass …


Educational Methods For Inverted-Lecture Computer Science And Engineering Classrooms To Overcome Common Barriers To Stem Student Success, Kathleen Timmerman Jan 2016

Educational Methods For Inverted-Lecture Computer Science And Engineering Classrooms To Overcome Common Barriers To Stem Student Success, Kathleen Timmerman

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New educational pedagogies are emerging in an effort to increase the number of new engineers available to enter the workforce in the coming years. One of the re-occurring themes in these pedagogies is variations of the flipped classroom. Often the additional classroom time gained from flipping is used to reinforce learning objectives. It is hypothesized that it might be more beneficial to students if a portion of that time is used to address common non-cognitive barriers that prevent students from succeeding in the major. In a freshman Introductory Computer Science course, three different pedagogies are compared: a hybrid lecture-active learning …


Thermoelectric Transport And Energy Conversion Using Novel 2d Materials, Luke J. Wirth Jan 2016

Thermoelectric Transport And Energy Conversion Using Novel 2d Materials, Luke J. Wirth

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Nanomaterials hold great promise for applications in thermal management and thermoelectric power generation. Defects in these are important as they are generally inevitably introduced during fabrication or intentionally engineered to control the properties of the nanomaterials. Here, we investigate how phonon-contributed thermal conductance in narrow graphene, boron nitride (BN), and silicene nanoribbons (NRs), responds to the presence of a vacancy defect and the corresponding geometric distortion, from first principles using the non-equilibrium Green's function method. Analyses are made of the geometries, phonon conductance coefficients, and local densities of states (LDOS) of pristine and defected nanoribbons. It is found that hydrogen …


De-Anonymization Attack Anatomy And Analysis Of Ohio Nursing Workforce Data Anonymization, Jacob M. Miracle Jan 2016

De-Anonymization Attack Anatomy And Analysis Of Ohio Nursing Workforce Data Anonymization, Jacob M. Miracle

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Data generalization (anonymization) is a widely misunderstood technique for preserving individual privacy in non-interactive data publishing. Easily avoidable anonymization failures are still occurring 14 years after the discovery of basic techniques to protect against them. Identities of individuals in anonymized datasets are at risk of being disclosed by cyber attackers who exploit these failures. To demonstrate the importance of proper data anonymization we present three perspectives on data anonymization. First, we examine several de-anonymization attacks to formalize the anatomy used to conduct attacks on anonymous data. Second, we examine the vulnerabilities of an anonymous nursing workforce survey to convey how …


Synthesis And Characterization Of Peek Analogues Utilizing 3,5- And 2,4-Difluorobenzophenone., Zachary Ewing Jan 2016

Synthesis And Characterization Of Peek Analogues Utilizing 3,5- And 2,4-Difluorobenzophenone., Zachary Ewing

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Two routes to semi-crystalline, potentially functionalizable poly(ether ether ketone), PEEK, analogues were explored using varying percentages of 4,4’-difluorobenzophenone and either 3,5-difluorobenzophenone or 2,4-difluorobenzophenone as the electrophilic component in nucleophilic aromatic substitution polycondensation reactions with hydroquinone. PEEK analogues utilizing 3,5-difluorobenzophenone were carried out in a “one-pot” fashion and their properties were compared to the same materials prepared previously by a multi-step synthetic procedure. The use of 2,4-difluorobenzophenone led to completely new PEEK analogues. The polymers were characterized via NMR spectroscopy, Size Exclusion Chromatography, Thermogravimetic Analysis, and Differential Scanning Calorimetry. Molecular weight determinations showed the synthesized polymers to be of a variety …


Computer Modeling Of A Solar Thermal System For Space Heating, Dhananjay D. Deshpande Jan 2016

Computer Modeling Of A Solar Thermal System For Space Heating, Dhananjay D. Deshpande

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Most applications of flat plate, low-temperature solar thermal panels are for water heating, such as producing domestic hot water or raising the temperature of swimming pools. This is reasonable given that the large masses of water present in these systems inherently provide built-in thermal energy storage so that a separate energy storage tank does not have to be purchased. For a space heating system, extra thermal energy storage generally has to be purchased and is a detriment to the economics of these systems. Despite the economic drawbacks of solar thermal space heating, this thesis focuses on the size of thermal …


A Hybrid Approach To Aerial Video Image Registration, Karol T. Salva Jan 2016

A Hybrid Approach To Aerial Video Image Registration, Karol T. Salva

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Many video processing applications, such as motion detection and tracking, rely on accurate and robust alignment between consecutive video frames. Traditional approaches to video image registration, such as pyramidal Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) feature detection and tracking are fast and subpixel accurate, but are not robust to large inter-frame displacements due to rotation, scale, or translation. This thesis presents an alternative hybrid approach using normalized gradient correlation (NGC) in the frequency domain and normalized cross-correlation (NCC) in the spatial domain that is fast, accurate, and robust to large displacements. A scale space search is incorporated into NGC to enable more consistent recovery …


Intelligent Caching To Mitigate The Impact Of Web Robots On Web Servers, Howard Nathan Rude Jan 2016

Intelligent Caching To Mitigate The Impact Of Web Robots On Web Servers, Howard Nathan Rude

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With an ever increasing amount of data that is shared and posted on the Web, the desire and necessity to automatically glean this information has led to an increase in the sophistication and volume of software agents called web robots or crawlers. Recent measurements, including our own across the entire logs of Wright State University Web servers over the past two years, suggest that at least 60\% of all requests originate from robots rather than humans. Web robots display different statistical and behavioral patterns in their traffic compared to humans, yet present Web server optimizations presume that traffic exhibits predominantly …


High Powered Pulsed Terahertz Light Generation From Superconducting Antenna Arrays, Nicholas C. Padgett Jan 2016

High Powered Pulsed Terahertz Light Generation From Superconducting Antenna Arrays, Nicholas C. Padgett

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Terahertz radiation is invaluable for use in spectroscopy and imaging work due to its nondestructive nature. It has become a key focus for those wishing to develop sensors capable of detecting weapons and narcotics unobtrusively and at a distance as well as characterizing materials and identifying defects. An ultrafast pulsed (femtoseconds) laser incident on a superconducting ring has been predicted to cause the emission of terahertz (THz) radiation. It is theorized that the radiation is a result of the supercurrent being modulated by the breaking and recombining of Cooper pairs on the order of picoseconds, where the time scale determines …


Identifying Offensive Videos On Youtube, Rajeshwari Kandakatla Jan 2016

Identifying Offensive Videos On Youtube, Rajeshwari Kandakatla

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Harassment on social media has become a critical problem and social media content depicting harassment is becoming common place. Video-sharing websites such as YouTube contain content that may be offensive to certain community, insulting to certain religion, race etc., or make fun of disabilities. These videos can also provoke and promote altercations leading to online harassment of individuals and groups. In this thesis, we present a system that identifies offensive videos on YouTube. Our goal is to determine features that can be used to detect offensive videos efficiently and reliably. We conducted experiments using content and metadata available for each …


Resqu: A Framework For Automatic Evaluation Of Knowledge-Driven Automatic Summarization, Nishita Jaykumar Jan 2016

Resqu: A Framework For Automatic Evaluation Of Knowledge-Driven Automatic Summarization, Nishita Jaykumar

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Automatic generation of summaries that capture the salient aspects of a search resultset (i.e., automatic summarization) has become an important task in biomedical research. Automatic summarization offers an avenue for overcoming the information overload problem prevalent in large online digital libraries. However, across many of the knowledge-driven approaches for automatic summarization it is not always clear which features highly impact or influence the quality of a summary. Instead, there has been considerable focus on utilizing schema knowledge to facilitate browsing and exploration of generated summaries a posteriori. Informative features should not be ignored, since they could be utilized to help …


Determination Of Atmospheric Particulate Matter Composition In The Dayton Metro Area, Saagar Mahendra Patel Jan 2016

Determination Of Atmospheric Particulate Matter Composition In The Dayton Metro Area, Saagar Mahendra Patel

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Quartz filters from high-volume air samplers of particulate matter of a size less than 10 micrometers in diameter (PM10) located in Moraine and Yellow Springs, Ohio, were obtained from the Regional Air Pollution Control Agency and analyzed for levoglucosan, metals, and the EPA 16 priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Average concentration of levoglucosan increased as ambient temperature decreased. Winter concentrations of levoglucosan for Moraine and Yellow Springs were 39.41 ± 31.58 µg/g and 51.52 ± 27.44 µg/g, respectively, which is due to a greater amount of residential wood burning in the colder months. The concentration of biomass burning …


Temporal Variation Of Mercury In Effluent From Two Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plants In Southwest Ohio, Heather Brittany Perusini Jan 2016

Temporal Variation Of Mercury In Effluent From Two Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plants In Southwest Ohio, Heather Brittany Perusini

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Mercury (Hg) is a toxic metal that, once converted to methylmercury by microorganisms, bioaccumulates in aquatic food webs and poses a health risk to wildlife and humans who eat fish. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are a source of Hg to surface waters, but little is known about the temporal variability of Hg concentrations in effluent and efflux to aquatic systems. I quantified the concentration of Hg in effluent from the City of Dayton (Ohio) and Ford Road (Xenia, Ohio) WWTPs and examined temporal variability over monthly and hourly time scales as well as efficiency of Hg removal. Over a 13-month …


Spatial Variation In Tooth Shape Of Miocene Populations Of Carcharocles Megalodon Across Ocean Basins, Maxwell John Bertsos Jan 2016

Spatial Variation In Tooth Shape Of Miocene Populations Of Carcharocles Megalodon Across Ocean Basins, Maxwell John Bertsos

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The extinct Lamniform species, Carcharocles megalodon, were some of the most geographically widespread apex predators in the fossil record. However, whether this cosmopolitan distribution was related to population level differences is unknown. The objective of this study is to assess whether variation in tooth morphology coincided with geographic dispersal. The underlying hypothesis is that variation in an aspect of functional morphology, such as tooth shape, suggests some level of population structuring. Detecting this relationship could potentially provide a mechanism that links population to functional relationships inherent in tooth morphology that may reflect period differences in ocean basins. This would offer …


Correlations Between Introductory Students’ Attitudes About Physics And Conceptual Understanding, Raym Alzahrani Jan 2016

Correlations Between Introductory Students’ Attitudes About Physics And Conceptual Understanding, Raym Alzahrani

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The purpose of this study is to measure correlations between the students’ incoming attitudes, beliefs and expectations about physics and their conceptual understanding. The study presents a profile of the attitudes and beliefs for Wright State University students who enrolled in calculus-based General Physics I courses during academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-2016. Students’ initial and final attitudes, measured using the CLASS, are correlated with initial and final conceptual gain, measured using the Force Concept Inventory. Students’ initial attitudes (Opre) was correlated with students’ gain (FCIgain) in many sections. Correlations between students’ final attitudes (Opost) and their conceptual understanding (FCIpost), reported …


Development Of Analytical Equations For Optimum Tilt Of Two-Axis And Single-Axis Rotating Solar Panels For Clear-Atmosphere Condition, Gaurav Subhash Gugale Jan 2016

Development Of Analytical Equations For Optimum Tilt Of Two-Axis And Single-Axis Rotating Solar Panels For Clear-Atmosphere Condition, Gaurav Subhash Gugale

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Solar Energy is a renewable energy source which is used widely in recent times. Photovoltaic panels collect the sun’s energy and convert it to electricity. Photovoltaic panels are being widely used in both domestic applications, commercial applications, and small-scale power generation applications. Photovoltaic panels are easy to install, they generate most of their power when electrical demands peak, prices of photovoltaic panels are dropping rapidly, photovoltaic panels require low maintenance, their operating costs are minimal, and they are highly suitable for remote applications. The amount of electricity produced by photovoltaic panels depends on the amount of sunlight the panel captures. …