Digital Commons Network^™

Temporal And Spatial Trends Of Dead Copepods In The Northern Gulf Of Mexico In Relation To The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Jessica L. Tolan

LSU Master's Theses

Zooplankton are a critical link between primary producers and higher trophic levels in the marine environment. They play a critical role in carbon cycling, are an important food source for commercially important species, and are excellent indicator genera for environmental changes that take place in marine ecosystems. This research quantified temporal and spatial patterns of dead copepods in response to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (DWH) site using ZooSCAN imaging technologies. Research showed that the proportion of dead copepods (showed evidence of decay but no physical damage due to predation) increased with depth, and at time periods closest to the …

Identification Of Top-Down, Bottom-Up, And Cement-Treated Reflective Cracks Using Convolutional Neural Network And Artificial Neural Network, Nirmal Dhakal

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of this study was to formulate a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) model and to develop a decision-making tool using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to identify top-down, bottom-up, and cement treated (CT) reflective cracking in in-service flexible pavements. The CNN’s architecture consisted of five convolutional layers with three max-pooling layers and three fully connected layers. Input variables for the ANN model were pavement age, asphalt concrete (AC) thickness, annual average daily traffic (AADT), type of base, crack orientation, and crack location. The ANN network architecture consisted of an input layer of six neurons, a hidden layer of ten neurons, …

Video-Based Interventions: Teaching Adults And Preschoolers, Philip Ross Richard Iii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Long gone are the days in which technology is looked upon as a trivial novelty. Whether evoking positive or negative reactions, advancements in technology continue to alter our daily environments. One such example is Video Based Interventions (VBI). VBI utilize video recording to facilitate the acquisition of various skills and behaviors (Rayner, Denholm, & Sigafoos, 2009). While it may sound like a simple intervention at first, many procedural variations of have been examined in research and practice. The two experiments comprising the current study examined the effectiveness of video models when used in conjunction with other instructional methods. Experiment I …

Evolution Of Computational Thinking Contextualized In A Teacher-Student Collaborative Learning Environment., John Arthur Underwood

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The discussion of Computational Thinking as a pedagogical concept is now essential as it has found itself integrated into the core science disciplines with its inclusion in all of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS, 2018). The need for a practical and functional definition for teacher practitioners is a driving point for many recent research endeavors. Across the United States school systems are currently seeking new methods for expanding their students’ ability to analytically think and to employee real-world problem-solving strategies (Hopson, Simms, and Knezek, 2001). The need for STEM trained individuals crosses both the vocational certified and college degreed …

Attosecond Time-Domain Measurement Of Core-Level-Exciton Decay In Magnesium Oxide, Romain Géneaux, Christopher J. Kaplan, Lun Yue, Andrew D. Ross, Jens E. Bækhøj, Peter M. Kraus, Hung Tzu Chang, Alexander Guggenmos, Mi Ying Huang, Michael Zürch, Kenneth J. Schafer, Daniel M. Neumark, Mette B. Gaarde, Stephen R. Leone

Faculty Publications

Excitation of ionic solids with extreme ultraviolet pulses creates localized core-level excitons, which in some cases couple strongly to the lattice. Here, core-level-exciton states of magnesium oxide are studied in the time domain at the Mg L2,3 edge with attosecond transient reflectivity spectroscopy. Attosecond pulses trigger the excitation of these short-lived quasiparticles, whose decay is perturbed by time-delayed near-infrared pulses. Combined with a few-state theoretical model, this reveals that the infrared pulse shifts the energy of bright (dipole-allowed) core-level-exciton states as well as induces features arising from dark core-level excitons. We report coherence lifetimes for the two lowest core-level excitons …

Temporal Decomposition For Multi-Interval Optimization In Power Systems, Farnaz Safdarian

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Large optimization problems are frequently solved for power systems operation and analysis of electricity markets. Many of these problems are multi-interval optimization with intertemporal constraints. The size of optimization problems depends on the size of the system and the length of the considered scheduling horizon. Growing the length of the scheduling horizon increases the computational burden significantly and might make solving the problem in a required time span impossible. Many simplifications and approximation techniques are applied to reduce the computational complexity of multi-interval scheduling problems and make them solvable in a reasonable time span. Geographical decomposition is presented in the …

Synthesis, Characterization, And Investigation Of Metal Ion Quenching In Fluorescent Carbon Dot Surrogates For Particulate Matter Black Carbon And Evaluation Of Cellular Health Effects Due To The Surrogate Materials, Christopher Lee Sumner Jr

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Black carbon (BC) is an environmental pollutant of particular concern to many international organizations for both its health effects and environmental effects. Probing health effects of BC as produced in the environment is difficult due to the complex nature of environmental pollutants found in their naturally occurring state. Fluorescent carbon dots (FCDs) were chosen to be used as a surrogate for BC. In the process of examining FCDs and their behavior as surrogates, information was gained on the health effects and behavior of FCDs as a class of nanomaterials for cell and tissue studies, which is outlined in this dissertation. …

Patterns Of Physical Performance Spurts During Adolescence: A Cross-Cultural Study Of Canadian, Brazilian And Portuguese Boys, Eduardo Guimarães, Adam D.G. Baxter-Jones, Sara Pereira, Fernando Garbeloto, Duarte Freitas, Manuel A. Janeira, Go Tani, Peter T. Katzmarzyk, Simonete Silva, Donald A. Bailey, Robert L. Mirwald, José Maia

Population and Public Health Science Faculty Publications

Background: Data relating physical performance to the timing of the adolescent growth spurt are limited. Aim: This study identifies: (i) age-at-peak height velocity (APHV), (ii) physical performance spurt patterns aligned to APHV; and (iii) cross-cultural and time patterns in Canadian, Brazilian and Portuguese boys. Subjects and methods: A total of 512 boys (131 Canadian, 250 Portuguese and 131 Brazilian), 8–17 years of age were followed serially using longitudinal data. APHV was identified and five physical performance measures velocities [trunk extension (TE), trunk flexion (TF), standing long jump (SLJ), curl-ups (CU) and handgrip strength (HG)] were aligned at 6-month intervals, 4 …

Nwchem: Past, Present, And Future, E. Aprà, E. J. Bylaska, W. A. De Jong, N. Govind, K. Kowalski, T. P. Straatsma, M. Valiev, H. J.J. Van Dam, Y. Alexeev, J. Anchell, V. Anisimov, F. W. Aquino, R. Atta-Fynn, J. Autschbach, N. P. Bauman, J. C. Becca, D. E. Bernholdt, K. Bhaskaran-Nair, S. Bogatko, P. Borowski, J. Boschen, J. Brabec, A. Bruner, E. Cauët, Y. Chen, G. N. Chuev, C. J. Cramer, J. Daily, M. J.O. Deegan, T. H. Dunning, M. Dupuis, K. G. Dyall, G. I. Fann

Faculty Publications

© 2020 U.S. Government. Specialized computational chemistry packages have permanently reshaped the landscape of chemical and materials science by providing tools to support and guide experimental efforts and for the prediction of atomistic and electronic properties. In this regard, electronic structure packages have played a special role by using first-principle-driven methodologies to model complex chemical and materials processes. Over the past few decades, the rapid development of computing technologies and the tremendous increase in computational power have offered a unique chance to study complex transformations using sophisticated and predictive many-body techniques that describe correlated behavior of electrons in molecular and …

Data For Wetlandscapes And Their Changes Around The World, Navid Ghajarnia, Georgia Destouni, Josefin Thorslund, Zahra Kalantari, Imenne Ahlén, Jesús A. Anaya-Acevedo, Juan F. Blanco-Libreros, Sonia Borja, Sergey Chalov, Aleksandra Chalova, Kwok P. Chun, Nicola Clerici, Amanda Desormeaux, Bethany B. Garfield, Pierre Girard, Olga Gorelits, Amy Hansen, Fernando Jaramillo, Jerker Jarsjö, Adnane Labbaci, John Livsey, Giorgos Maneas, Kathryn Mc Curley Pisarello, Sebastián Palomino-Ángel, Jan Pietroń, René M. Price, Victor H. Rivera-Monroy, Jorge Salgado, A. Britta, Samaneh Seifollahi-Aghmiuni, Ylva Sjöberg, Pavel Terskii, Guillaume Vigouroux

Faculty Publications

Geography and associated hydrological, hydroclimate and land-use conditions and their changes determine the states and dynamics of wetlands and their ecosystem services. The influences of these controls are not limited to just the local scale of each individual wetland but extend over larger landscape areas that integrate multiple wetlands and their total hydrological catchment-the wetlandscape. However, the data and knowledge of conditions and changes over entire wetlandscapes are still scarce, limiting the capacity to accurately understand and manage critical wetland ecosystems and their services under global change. We present a new Wetlandscape Change Information Database (WetCID), consisting of geographic, hydrological, …

Evaluation Of Undrained Shear Strength Of Soil, Ultimate Pile Capacity And Pile Set-Up Parameter From Cone Penetration Test (Cpt) Using Artificial Neural Network (Ann), Md Ariful Hassan Mojumder

LSU Master's Theses

Over the years, numerous design methods were developed to evaluate the undrained shear strength, S_u, ultimate pile capacity and pile set-up parameter, A. In recent decades, the emphasis was given to the in-situ cone and piezocone penetration tests (CPT, PCPT) to estimate these parameters since CPT/PCPT has been proven to be fast, reliable and cost-effective soil investigation method. However, because of the paucity of a vivid comprehension of the physical problem, some of the developed methods incorporate correlation assumptions which might compromise the consistent accuracy. In this study, the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was exerted using CPT data …

Predictive Modeling Of Asynchronous Event Sequence Data, Jin Shang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Large volumes of temporal event data, such as online check-ins and electronic records of hospital admissions, are becoming increasingly available in a wide variety of applications including healthcare analytics, smart cities, and social network analysis. Those temporal events are often asynchronous, interdependent, and exhibiting self-exciting properties. For example, in the patient's diagnosis events, the elevated risk exists for a patient that has been recently at risk. Machine learning that leverages event sequence data can improve the prediction accuracy of future events and provide valuable services. For example, in e-commerce and network traffic diagnosis, the analysis of user activities can be …

Alternative Methods, Hunter Stabler

LSU Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

In the realm of precognitive artmaking, the artist’s role is that of an antenna. One must be receptive to the subtle, invisible flow of creative novelty in order to participate in the involuntary channeling of new ideas, new processes, and alternative methods of creative production. Carving out new territory within the realm of static art is a primary objective for my artistic process. By utilizing digital fabrication tools, paired with my affinity for intricate craft and optical metagrobolization, I have created a body of work that invents alternative processes and unique aesthetic languages.

Digital imaging, digital modeling and digital …

Combinatorial And Asymptotic Statistical Properties Of Partitions And Unimodal Sequences, Walter Mcfarland Bridges

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Our main results are asymptotic zero-one laws satisfied by the diagrams of unimodal sequences of positive integers. These diagrams consist of columns of squares in the plane; the upper boundary is called the shape. For various types of unimodal sequences, we show that, as the number of squares tends to infinity, 100% of shapes are near a certain curve---that is, there is a single limit shape. Similar phenomena have been well-studied for integer partitions, but several technical difficulties arise in the extension of such asymptotic statistical laws to unimodal sequences. We develop a widely applicable method for obtaining these limit …

New Synthetic Transformations Utilizing Silyloxyallyl Cations And Epoxonium Ions As Reactive Intermediates, Alexander Houston Cleveland

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The development of new chemical transformations is of paramount importance in organic chemistry. In fact the study and creation of new reactions often uncovers new chemical reactivities and creates a new area of chemistry. The purpose of this dissertation is to present the development of new synthetic reactions that were uncovered through previous discoveries. Additionally the underlying theme of this work relies on the intermediacy of cationic reactive intermediates such as silyloxyallyl cations and epoxonium ions. Chapters 1 and 2 present the reactivity of novel silyloxyallyl cations. These cationic species are generated via the mild ionization of a-hydroxy silylenol ethers …

Behavior Of Iron Species And Free Radicals In Ambient Pm2.5 And Pm Surrogates, Cholena Russo Ren

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Air pollution, consisting of ambient particulate matter (PM), has been a rising health concern to the public. PM contains free radicals and have been known to damage human cells; however, their free radical chemistry is not well understood. This study utilized various vacuum and/or heat treatments to study free radical behavior in PM_2.5 (particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 mm or less) and PM surrogates and simulated sunlight effects on PM_2.5. To mimic PM, iron-silica catalysts (i.e. PM surrogates) were synthesized and real-world ambient PM_2.5 was selected. The free radicals in PM_{2.5 …}

Legendrian Dga Representations And The Colored Kauffman Polynomial, Justin Murray, Dan Rutherford

Faculty Publications

For any Legendrian knot K in standard contact R-3 we relate counts of ungraded (1-graded) representations of the Legendrian contact homology DG-algebra (A(K), partial derivative) with the n-colored Kauffman polynomial. To do this, we introduce an ungraded n-colored ru-ling polynomial, R-n,K(1)(q), as a linear combination of reduced ruling polynomials of positive permutation braids and show that (i) R-n,K(1)(q) arises as a specialization F-n,F-K(a, q)vertical bar(a-1) = 0 of the n-colored Kauffman polynomial and (ii) when q is a power of two R-n,K(1)(q) agrees with the total ungraded representation number, Rep(1) (K, F-q(n)), which is a normalized count of n-dimensional representations …

Stunting And Physical Fitness. The Peruvian Health And Optimist Growth Study, Carla Santos, Alcibíades Bustamante, Olga Vasconcelos, Sara Pereira, Rui Garganta, Go Tani, Donald Hedeker, Peter T. Katzmarzyk, José Maia

Population and Public Health Science Faculty Publications

Stunting, defined as linear growth retardation, is a serious public health problem in developing countries. We aimed to (1) describe the prevalence of stunting in Peruvian youth living in three geographical regions, and to (2) determine height and physical fitness (PF) differences between stunted and normal-growth children across age and sex. We sampled 7918 subjects (7074 normal-growth and 844 stunted), aged 6–15 year, from sea-level, Amazon and high-altitude regions of Peru. PF was assessed with standardized tests, and stunting was computed following World Health Organization (WHO) standards. A two-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) model was used. Results showed that stunting …

Baseline Habitual Physical Activity Predicts Weight Loss, Weight Compensation, And Energy Intake During Aerobic Exercise, Christoph Höchsmann, James L. Dorling, John W. Apolzan, Neil M. Johannsen, Daniel S. Hsia, Corby K. Martin

Clinical Research Faculty Publications

Objective: This study aimed to determine whether different measures of habitual physical activity (PA) at baseline predict weight change, weight compensation, and changes in energy intake (EI) during a 24-week supervised aerobic exercise intervention. Methods: Data from 108 participants (78 women; 48.7 [SD: 11.6] years; BMI 31.4 [SD: 4.6] kg/m2), randomly assigned to either the moderate-dose exercise group (8 kcal/kg of body weight per week) or the high-dose exercise group (20 kcal/kg of body weight per week) of the Examination of Mechanisms of Exercise-induced Weight Compensation (E-MECHANIC) trial, were analyzed. Moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), steps per day, and PA energy expenditure …

3d-Printed Structured-Illumination Neutron Optics For Phase Contrast Imaging With A Triga Neutron Source, Bridget Cadigan

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Triple Oxygen Isotope Composition Of Precambrian Chert, Frasier L. Liljestrand, Andrew H. Knoll, Nicholas J. Tosca, Phoebe A. Cohen, Francis A. Macdonald, Yongbo Peng, David T. Johnston

Faculty Publications

© 2020 Elsevier B.V. The temperature and chemistry of early seawater have both been inferred from the isotopic composition of Precambrian chert (SiO2), a precipitated mineral formed on or within marine sediments. The δ18O of chert shows a robust quasi-linear increase through time - a signal that has been interpreted in a number of conflicting ways. For example, changing δ18O has been hypothesized to reflect the product of cooling surface ocean temperatures, a signature of evolving seawater δ18O composition, or the product of later stage diagenesis (where measured δ18O reflects the composition of diagenetic fluids). We suggest this uncertainty can …

Ranking Tournaments With No Errors Ii: Minimax Relation, Xujin Chen, Guoli Ding, Wenan Zang, Qiulan Zhao

Faculty Publications

A tournament T=(V,A) is called cycle Mengerian (CM) if it satisfies the minimax relation on packing and covering cycles, for every nonnegative integral weight function defined on A. The purpose of this series of two papers is to show that a tournament is CM iff it contains none of four Möbius ladders as a subgraph; such a tournament is referred to as Möbius-free. In the first paper we have given a structural description of all Möbius-free tournaments, and have proved that every CM tournament is Möbius-free. In this second paper we establish the converse by using our structural theorems and …

Arbitrage Opportunities In Publication And Ghost Authors, Lawrence Smolinsky

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Quasilinear Riccati-Type Equations With Oscillatory And Singular Data, Quoc Hung Nguyen, Nguyen Cong Phuc

Faculty Publications

We characterize the existence of solutions to the quasilinear Riccati-type equation [EQUATION PRESENTED] with a distributional or measure datum . Here divA(x) is a quasilinear elliptic operator modeled after the p-Laplacian (p > 1), and is a bounded domain whose boundary is sufficiently flat (in the sense of Reifenberg). For distributional data, we assume that p > 1 and q > p. For measure data, we assume that they are compactly supported in, p > 3n.2 2n-1 , and q is in the sub-linear range p -1 > q > 1.We also assume more regularity conditions on A and on δωω in this case.

Magnetic Field–Driven Assembly And Reconfiguration Of Multicomponent Supraparticles, A. Al Harraq, J. G. Lee, B. Bharti

Faculty Publications

Suprastructures at the colloidal scale must be assembled with precise control over local interactions to accurately mimic biological complexes. The toughest design requirements include breaking the symmetry of assembly in a simple and reversible fashion to unlock functions and properties so far limited to living matter. We demonstrate a simple experimental technique to program magnetic field–induced interactions between metallodielectric patchy particles and isotropic, nonmagnetic “satellite” particles. By controlling the connectivity, composition, and distribution of building blocks, we show the assembly of three-dimensional, multicomponent supraparticles that can dynamically reconfigure in response to change in external field strength. The local arrangement of …

Information Retrieval-Based Optimization Approaches For Requirement Traceability Recovery, Danissa Victoria Rodriguez Caraballo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Requirements traceability provides support for important software engineering activities. Requirements traceability recovery (RTR) is becoming increasingly important due to the numerous benefits to the overall quality of software. Improving the RTR problem has become an active topic of research for software engineers; researchers have proposed a number of approaches for improving and automating RTR across the requirements and the source code of the system. Textual analysis and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been applied to the RTR problem for many years; however, most of the existing IR-based methodologies applied to the RTR problem are semiautomatic or time-consuming, even though many …

Search For Electron Antineutrino Appearance In A Long-Baseline Muon Antineutrino Beam, K. Abe, R. Akutsu, A. Ali, C. Alt, C. Andreopoulos, L. Anthony, M. Antonova, S. Aoki, A. Ariga, Y. Asada, Y. Ashida, E. T. Atkin, Y. Awataguchi, S. Ban, M. Barbi, G. J. Barker, G. Barr, D. Barrow, C. Barry, M. Batkiewicz-Kwasniak, A. Beloshapkin, F. Bench, V. Berardi, S. Berkman, L. Berns, S. Bhadra, S. Bienstock, A. Blondel

Faculty Publications

Electron antineutrino appearance is measured by the T2K experiment in an accelerator-produced antineutrino beam, using additional neutrino beam operation to constrain parameters of the Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata (PMNS) mixing matrix. T2K observes 15 candidate electron antineutrino events with a background expectation of 9.3 events. Including information from the kinematic distribution of observed events, the hypothesis of no electron antineutrino appearance is disfavored with a significance of 2.40σ and no discrepancy between data and PMNS predictions is found. A complementary analysis that introduces an additional free parameter which allows non-PMNS values of electron neutrino and antineutrino appearance also finds no discrepancy between data …

Constraint On The Matter–Antimatter Symmetry-Violating Phase In Neutrino Oscillations, K. Abe, R. Akutsu, A. Ali, C. Alt, C. Andreopoulos, L. Anthony, M. Antonova, S. Aoki, A. Ariga, T. Arihara, Y. Asada, Y. Ashida, E. T. Atkin, Y. Awataguchi, S. Ban, M. Barbi, G. J. Barker, G. Barr, D. Barrow, C. Barry, M. Batkiewicz-Kwasniak, A. Beloshapkin, F. Bench, V. Berardi, S. Berkman, L. Berns, S. Bhadra, S. Bienstock

Faculty Publications

The charge-conjugation and parity-reversal (CP) symmetry of fundamental particles is a symmetry between matter and antimatter. Violation of this CP symmetry was first observed in 19641, and CP violation in the weak interactions of quarks was soon established2. Sakharov proposed3 that CP violation is necessary to explain the observed imbalance of matter and antimatter abundance in the Universe. However, CP violation in quarks is too small to support this explanation. So far, CP violation has not been observed in non-quark elementary particle systems. It has been shown that CP violation in leptons could generate the matter–antimatter disparity through a process …

Primordial Power Spectrum From The Dressed Metric Approach In Loop Cosmologies, Bao Fei Li, Parampreet Singh, Anzhong Wang

Faculty Publications

We investigate the consequences of different regularizations and ambiguities in loop cosmological models on the predictions in the scalar and tensor primordial spectrum of the cosmic microwave background using the dressed metric approach. Three models, standard loop quantum cosmology (LQC), and two modified loop quantum cosmologies (mLQC-I and mLQC-II) arising from different regularizations of the Lorentzian term in the classical Hamiltonian constraint are explored for chaotic inflation in spatially flat Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) universe. In each model, two different treatments of the conjugate momentum of the scale factor are considered. The first one corresponds to the conventional treatment in dressed metric …

Accurate Tracking Of Position And Dose During Vmat Based On Vmat-Ct, Xiaodong Zhao

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Purpose: Local tomography reconstruction is achievable with EPID images acquired during VMAT and was named as VMAT-CT. However, it did not gain popularity due to multiple limitations and technical challenges. The goal of this study was to extend VMAT-CT concept, generate complete 3D or 4D CT images and dose, track and adapt VMAT plan based on updated images and dose.

Methods: We considered collimator angle and removed blurred areas in EPID images for VMAT-CT reconstruction to reduce artifacts and improve image quality. VMAT-CT+ images were generated by fusing VMAT-CT and planning CT using rigid or deformable registration. For 4D SBRT …