Digital Commons Network^™

Effects Of The Ketogenic Diet On Spatial Memory And Long-Term Potentiation In The Ca1 Region Of The Hippocampus In Young Rodents, Jed Christensen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The ketogenic diet (KD) originated as a treatment for epilepsy nearly a century ago, though its neurological effects are not completely understood. In recent years the diet has resurged as a weight loss aid, reinvigorating research investigating its effects on the nervous system. Notably, the KD alters the concentration of glucose and ketones in the brain, and recent research suggests that the elevated ketone concentration, in the form of beta-hydroxybutyrate, induced by the diet enhances recognition memory and mitochondrial efficiency in the hippocampus. To further explore the effects of the KD, we examined its cognitive effects on spatial memory and …

Creating A Homophone-Based Chinese Language Censorship Evasion Tool, Emily Quan

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As the scope of Chinese language censorship expands, individuals will seek to bypass such censorship efforts. One of the most prevalent techniques in such censorship is automated keyword filtering. This research focuses on building a command-line tool that can bypass automated keyword filters for both traditional and simplified Chinese characters using a two-part approach. The first part involves detecting sensitive words in user-inputted text by using phrase matching techniques to identify character strings that have been censored in the past. The second part centers around generating possible obfuscated homonym alternatives. The tool relies on a compiled list of banned and …

Christianity On Homebrew: Alessandro Valignano, Indigenization, And Japan's Hidden Christians, Brayden Lane

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the historiographical connections between Alessandro Valignano and the localized tradition of Christianity that produced the hidden Christian communities of Japan in the seventeenth century. Valignano, as overseer of Jesuit missions in Asia in the late sixteenth century, implemented policy changes designed to bolster the number and quality of laymen clergy assisting the Westerners with missionary duties. Valignano faced criticism for his overestimation of the time needed for training and for his methodology, but his efforts to train and support laymen clergy contributed to a rising trend of Christianity as a unifying tradition for local communities. The laymen …

Mujeres Latinas En Acción: Pragmatic Feminism And The Longevity Of Grassroots Organizations, Lindsey Meza

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In 1973, Mujeres Latinas en Acción was formed in the midst of the Chicano Movement. Simultaneously, Chicana feminists were working in and breaking from Chicano organizations to fight for egalitarian gains. Pilsen, a neighborhood in Chicago and the home of Mujeres Latinas en Acción, was a hotbed for Chicano and Latino activism during this period. The women who founded MLEA saw similar disparities in social services offered to women in Pilsen that Chicanas around the country were noting. The ways in which Chicanas were approaching these feminist ventures varied. Based upon my studies of Mujeres Latinas en Acción, I argue …

Concentrating E. Coli At Initial Low Concentrations By Centrifugation With Phosphate Buffered Saline, Plasma, And Simulated Blood Suspensions, Sarah Williams

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The rapid diagnosis of blood stream infections (BSIs) is limited by the low concentration of bacteria in the blood. Currently, culturing of blood samples is used to increase the concentration of bacteria before the type of bacteria and the best antibiotic to treat the infection can be identified. However, the culturing of blood samples takes tens of hours, and therefore concentrating the bacteria from blood without growth will allow for quicker analysis and is crucial to saving lives. This thesis explored the means of concentrating E. coli suspensions in phosphate buffered saline (PBS), plasma, and simulated blood by centrifuging the …

Investigations Into U'-Band Photometry Of The Haumea System, Seneca Heilesen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The dwarf planet Haumea orbits near the edge of the Solar System in the Kuiper Belt. As it rotates, different parts of the object can be seen from Earth, so observing Haumea as it rotates allows us to see whether the surface is uniform or varied. Previous work has shown that one part of Haumea has a reddish dark spot, as opposed to the bright gray surface, and that Haumea has two nearby moons, the larger of which is called Hi’iaka. To better understand Haumea’s surface and Hi’iaka, we gathered new observations using BYU time at the Astronomical Research Consortium …

Elevating The Silicon Slopes, Joseph Evans

Undergraduate Honors Theses

From Utah’s humble beginnings in agriculture and mining, Utah has become an economic powerhouse in the United States, largely due to the rise of Silicon Slopes. Despite the successes of Silicon Slopes, there are still significant shortcomings related to diversity and inclusion in Silicon Slopes that must be remediated if it intends to achieve its economic aspirations and ensure its economic benefits flow to people of all types and backgrounds. This work outlines both the rise of Silicon Slopes as well as existing and potential private- and state-ordered solutions that may be implemented to overcome Silicon Slopes’ existing diversity and …

Creating The Listener Language: A Constructed Language With Semantic Rhythms And Tones, Dallyn H. Mccracken

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through creating a language that uses semantic rhythms to convey information in ways that typical intonation does not, I was able to see the benefits and drawbacks of strict semantic intonation. The Listener language replaces intonation with rhythms, and it uses rhythms in place of intonation in cases where intonation would generally be used in other languages, though it also uses rhythms in all other speech. Rhythms in the Listener language are grammatical, and speaking the language without the rhythms is considered to be ungrammatical. During the language construction process, there were several setbacks, both expected and unexpected. The Listener …

Made In His Image: How Christian God Image Influences Interpersonal Judgments Of Severe Mental Illness, Austin Davis

Undergraduate Honors Theses

After a review of the relevant literature on God image and interpersonal judgment theories and research, a priming study was used to analyze the relationship between God image and judgment of people with severe mental illness. Participants made judgments of a video presentation of a man with schizophrenia either before or after being given a questionnaire about their God image. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) analysis showed no statistically significant differences between those who were primed to reflect on their God image before making the judgment and those who were not, although the small effect size (d = -0.30) indicated …

Sources Of Atmospheric Dust Deposition On Utah Lake, Justin Telfer

Theses and Dissertations

Atmospheric deposition (AD) is a significant source of nutrient loading to waterbodies around the world. However, the sources and loading rates are poorly understood for major waterbodies and even less understood for local waterbodies. Utah Lake is a eutrophic lake located in central Utah, USA, and has high nutrient levels. Recent research has identified AD as significant sources for nutrient loading to the lake to better understand the dust AD sources, we sampled suspected source locations and collected deposition samples around the lake. We analyzed these samples using Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) for 25 metals to characterize their elemental fingerprints. …

Role Of The Cytosolic Chaperonin Cct In The Folding Of Novel Substrates, Theresa M. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

All cells depend on properly folded proteins for survival and function. Misfolding of proteins results in loss of critical functions and may trigger the misfolding of other nearby proteins leading to toxic aggregation. While many proteins can fold on their own, others with complicated domain structures require assistance from protein folding machines called chaperones. The most complex and highly specialized of all chaperones is the eukaryotic chaperonin complex CCT which is necessary for the folding of a wide variety of essential proteins. These include the cytoskeletal proteins actin and tubulin as well as the Gβ subunit of the G protein …

Full Issue

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

No abstract provided.

New Review A Double Issue

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The latest FARMS Review of Books is actually two issues in one. It reviews 15 books in the usual categories of Book of Mormon, Mormon studies, and biblical studies but also devotes more than 100 pages to a multipronged response to an evangelical book titled The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement.

Hierarchical Joint Entity Recognition And Relation Extraction Of Contextual Entities In Family History Records, Daniel Segrera

Theses and Dissertations

Entity extraction is an important step in document understanding. Higher accuracy entity extraction on fine-grained entities can be achieved by combining the utility of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) models. In this paper, a cascading model is proposed that implements NER and Relation extraction. This model utilizes relations between entities to infer context-dependent fine-grain named entities in text corpora. The RE module runs independent of the NER module, which reduces error accumulation from sequential steps. This process improves on the fine-grained NER F1-score of existing state-of-the-art from .4753 to .8563 on our data, albeit on a strictly …

Full Issue

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Institute News

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The Institute recently benefited from a generous gift of books and Mesoamerican artifacts from Jay and Ursula Krenusz. The donation of books, initially made to BYU's Harold B. Lee Library, was divided among the Lee Library, BYU- Idaho, and the Institute. The large collection of artifacts was donated to BYU's Museum of Peoples and Cultures.

New Volume Honors Truman G. Madsen

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The distinguished career of Truman G. Madsen has earned him wide respect in and outside of LDS circles as an outstanding teacher, scholar, researcher, speaker, university administrator, church leader, and religious ambassador. With the publication of Revelation, Reason, and Faith: Essays in Honor of Truman G. Madsen, the Institute pays tribute to this remarkable man whose many accomplishments include helping to advance Book of Mormon scholarship and related interests of the Institute.

Full Issue

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Joseph Smith Right On Target, New Book Shows

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

In his writings over the years, Hugh Nibley has often pointed out “hits” and “bull’s-eyes” in the Book of Mormon—details about the ancient world that were unknown until recent times but that Joseph Smith got right anyway. Serious Book of Mormon research took shape in the early 1900s but has accelerated in recent decades, establishing an entire field of scholarly endeavor and yielding many clues to the book’s ancient origins.

Sustainably Providing Accurate Local River Discharge Data With Global Hydrologic Modeling And Bias Corrections, Riley Chad Hales

Theses and Dissertations

The Global Water Sustainability Initiative of the Group of Earth Observations (GEOGloWS) supported an initiative to develop a global hydrologic model. The purpose of the modeling initiative is to build a high-quality model using the best available datasets and modeling methods with the primary emphasis on accessibility of the model. The goal is to make the model a sustainable source of river discharge information to supplement the capacity of those countries without the local capacity to maintain sufficient gauge networks and local modeling capabilities and cyberinfrastructure. Past research developed a modeling approach and piloted implementations and data and visualization services …

Developable Mechanisms On Right Conical Surfaces, Lance P. Hyatt, Spencer P. Magleby, Larry L. Howell

Faculty Publications

An approach for designing developable mechanisms on a conical surface is presented. By aligning the joint axes of spherical mechanisms to the ruling lines, the links can be created in a way that the mechanism conforms to a conical surface. Terminology is defined for mechanisms mapped onto a right cone. Models are developed to describe the motion of the mechanism with respect to the apex of the cone, and connections are made to cylindrical developable mechanisms using projected angles. The Loop Sum Method is presented as an approach to determine the geometry of the cone to which a given spherical …

Deployable Convex Generalized Cylindrical Surfaces Using Torsional Joints, Todd G. Nelson, Jared T. Burton, Curtis G. Nelson, Luis M. Baldelomar Pinto, Zhicheng Deng, Larry L. Howell

Faculty Publications

The ability to deploy a planar surface to a desired convex profile with a simple actuation can enhance foldable or morphing airfoils, deployable antennae and reflectors, and other applications where a specific profile geometry is desired from a planar sheet. A model using a system of rigid links joined by torsional springs of tailorable stiffness is employed to create an approximate curved surface when two opposing tip loads are applied. A system of equations describing the shape of the surface during deployment is developed. The physical implementation of the model uses compliant torsion bars as the torsion springs. A multidimensional …

Design Of Regular 1d, 2d, And 3d Linkage-Based Tessellations, Alden D. Yellowhorse, Nathan Brown, Larry L. Howell

Faculty Publications

Linkage origami is one effective approach for addressing stiffness and accommodating panels of finite size in origami models and tessellations. However, successfully implementing linkage origami in tessellations can be challenging. In this work, multiple theorems are presented that provide criteria for designing origami units or cells that can be assembled into arbitrarily large tessellations. The application of these theorems is demonstrated through examples of tessellations in two and three dimensions.

“Are These People Real?”: Designing And Playtesting An Alternative Reality, Educational Simulation, Jason K. Mcdonald, Jonathan Balzotti, Melissa Franklin, Jessica Haws, Jamin Rowan

Faculty Publications

In this design case, we report our design and playtest of a form of alternative reality, educational simulation that we call a playable case study (PCS). One of the features that make our simulations unique is how they are designed to implement a principle called This Is Not a Game, or TINAG, meaning that the affordances we design into the simulation suggest to students that the experience they are having is real, in contrast to the way the artificial nature of the experience is highlighted in many computer games. In this case, we describe some challenges we encountered in designing …

A Design Approach To Fully Compliant Multistable Mechanisms Employing A Single Bistable Mechanism, Yanjie Gou, Guimin Chen, Larry L. Howell

Faculty Publications

A fully compliant multistable mechanism is a monolithic structure that is capable of staying at multiple positions without power input, and has many applications including switches, valves, positioners. However, it is difficult to design such a mechanism because of the complexities of the multistable behavior, the practical stress limits and the buckling constraints. This paper discusses the design approach for fully compliant multistable mechanisms which employs a single bistable mechanism and several end-effectors connected in series. The force-displacement characteristics of the end-effectors are derived using the pseudo-rigid-body model. The design approach to the fully compliant multistable mechanism is provided to …

Applied Machine Learning In Development Of Geospatial Information Tools For Sustainable Groundwater Management, Saul Gallegos Ramirez

Theses and Dissertations

Groundwater plays an important role in sustainable water resource management. Globally, the development of groundwater resources for irrigation provides a stable water source and enhances food security. However, developing groundwater resources is difficult, requiring the collection, synthesis, analysis, and dissemination of information about groundwater in an accessible, effective manner so decision makers have the knowledge and tools to implement sustainable management strategies. In this dissertation, I present solutions to assist with the paucity of groundwater data. The first problem I explore is extending the Palmer Drought Severity Index to near present day. This dataset is crucial to current groundwater imputation …

Zero Torque Compliant Mechanisms Employing Pre-Buckled Beams, Pietro Bilancia, Samuel Porter Smith, Giovanni Berselli, Spencer P. Magleby, Larry L. Howell

Faculty Publications

The concept of a statically balanced mechanism with a single rotational degree of freedom is presented. The proposed device achieves static balancing by combining positive stiff- ness elements and negative stiffness elements within a nuclear domain. Two designs are discussed. The first is composed of an Archimedean spiral and two pinned-pinned pre-buckled beams. The overall mechanism is modeled via an analytical approach and the element dimensions are optimized. The optimal configuration is then tested through finite element analysis (FEA). A second approach replaces the spiral beam with elastic custom-shaped spline beams. An FEA optimization is performed to determine the shape …

Conceptualizing Stable States In Origami-Based Devices Using An Energy Visualization Approach, Jacob Greenwood, Larry L. Howell, Alex Avila, Spencer P. Magleby

Faculty Publications

In many origami-based applications, a device needs to be maintained in one or more fold states. The origami stability integration method (OSIM) presented in this paper pro- vides an approach for graphically combining various techniques to achieve stability. Existing stability techniques are also categorized into four groups based on whether they are intrinsic or extrinsic to the origami pattern and whether they exhibit gradual or non-gradual energy storage behaviors. These categorizations can help designers select appropriate techniques for their applications. The paper also contains de- sign considerations and resources for achieving stability. Finally, two case studies are presented that use …

Child Abuse In Residential Homes Of Ghana, Alyssa Minor

Ballard Brief

Children placed in residential homes in Ghana suffer from physical violence and physical neglect more often than children in family-based homes. In overcrowded residential homes, many basic needs are often not being met, and the use of physical violence is common due to inadequate funding, lack of training, lack of clear policies, and years of normalizing violent disciplinary actions. This problem of child abuse within residential homes of Ghana creates financial burdens on the country and negative psychosocial effects for children suffering from neglect or physical violence, hindering their ability to reach their full earnings potential. Very few interventions have …

Is There A Link Between Male Gonopodium Size And Mating Strategies Amongst Fish In The Family Poeciliidae?, Ryen Hunsaker, Jerald B. Johnson

Library/Life Sciences Undergraduate Poster Competition 2023

Have different male mating strategies led to evolutionary changes in male gonopodium size?

Natural selection should act strongly on any traits that affect successful reproduction. Fish species in the family Poeciliidae (livebearers) have a unique form of reproduction.