Digital Commons Network^™

Leveraging Multiple Data Sources: How Catch Data, Metadata, And Genetic Samples Can Aid The Recovery Of Endangered Smalltooth Sawfish (Pristis Pectinata), Kelcee Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The small population sizes characteristic of many imperiled species means that they are vulnerable to both demographic and genetic extinction threats. Responses to these threats (e.g., population trends, genetic diversity estimates) are often difficult to obtain, but critical for conservation. Thus, researchers studying imperiled species may have to consult multiple data sources, collaborate with a wide variety of stakeholders, or ask new questions about previously collected data. I used this approach to understand more about the United States (U.S.) population of Pristis pectinata, an endangered elasmobranch that has declined up to 95% due to habitat loss and bycatch in …

Potential Role Of Acetylation On Equine Sperm Capacitation, Luis H. De Aguiar

LSU Master's Theses

A series of biochemical and physical modifications in the sperm during the transport in the female reproductive tract that make the sperm capable of fertilization are called capacitation. It is an important process since ejaculated sperm is not capable of fertilizing an oocyte before capacitation. The sperm modifications during the capacitation process include changes in membrane fluidity, tyrosine phosphorylation, calcium influx, pH increase and hyperpolarization, leading the sperm to achieve hypermotility and the acrosome reaction, which are also required for conventional in vitrofertilization (IVF). In vitro production of embryos leading to viable offspring has been successful in different …

Mechanical Properties And Microstructure Characteristics Of Alloy Parts Produced By Laser Powder Bed Fusion (Lpbf) Method, Hong Yao

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapid prototyping technology to produce fully functional and complex designing objects. As one of the AM methods, Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) has gained the most attention from both academic researchers and industrial companies. During the LPBF process, metal powders are applied layer by layer, which can be 20 microns to 50 microns in thickness. After a layer is prepared, a high-power laser, which is commonly controlled by a scanning head, is used to selectively melt the interested area of a 2D geometry which is designed in a computer aided designing software. LPBF method can …

Prüfung: A Deconstruction Of Assessment Across Three Languages, Thomas Erich Benz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research aims at deconstructing and questioning certainties about assessment as an educational institution on its most fundamental levels. To achieve that, I am utilizing theoretical frameworks inspired by concepts on the existence of cultural and social capital, by artifact mediated cognition, and by a recently proposed discipline on pedagogy of assessment. The research operates with the application of narrative synthesis and network text analysis of material, on which they have not previously been used. As such, I aim to contribute to a methodological application of both methods on exam data, understood as the totality of curricular documents which govern …

Development, Validation, And Testing Of A Self-Assessment Tool To Measure Beliefs, Attitudes And Food Safety Behaviors In Healthcare Foodservice Operations, Kathryn Toups Fakier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Immunocompromised patients are often prescribed a neutropenic diet to reduce the intake of harmful microbial content. However research suggests it does not improve clinical outcomes when compared to a regular diet, is inconsistently defined and prescribed, and may even have adverse effects on a patient’s nutritional status and quality of life. To reflect evidenced-based practice, the Food and Drug Administration has suggested focusing on safe food handling practices rather than outdated dietary restrictions to reduce health risks. However, many healthcare institutions are reluctant to shift focus as it affects a high-risk patient population vulnerable to contracting a foodborne illness. In …

Development And Initial Psychometric Properties Of The Cannabidiol Outcome Expectancies Questionnaire (Cbd-Oeq), Katherine Walukevich-Dienst

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the United States, a growing number of adults are using products containing cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive cannabinoid marketed as a treatment for a large number of medical and mental health conditions, despite limited support for the efficacy of CBD for these conditions. Identification of CBD-related outcome expectancies (i.e., beliefs concerning the anticipated effects of using CBD) could be useful in understanding the etiology and maintenance of CBD use. Although there are several measures of cannabis outcome expectancies, no known CBD-specific outcome expectancy measure exists. The current study used a three phase, mixed methods approach to develop and test the …

An Analysis Of The Presence Of Dialogic Communication Features On Indiana Environmental Organizations' Websites, Jessica Moon

LSU Master's Theses

Dialogic communication is a two-way form of communication that allows entities such as organizations and their publics to share their viewpoints and contribute to decision-making processes openly and equally. The Five Dialogic Principles of Public Relations (ease of use of the interface, usefulness of information, conservation of visitors, generation of return visits, and dialogic loop) is a framework that has been used to examine this form of communication online. Research has shown that organizations’ websites have a generally low presence of features related to the Five Dialogic Principles. The goal of the present study was to determine the …

Electrochemical Reduction Of Hexavalent Chromium In Acetonitrile Using Glassy Carbon Electrodes, Temitope Jegede

LSU Master's Theses

Hexavalent chromium Cr(VI), a form of chromium mainly generated through industrial processes, has attracted great research interests due to its severe toxicity to biological systems. A common way to remove hexavalent chromium from industrial wastes is through reduction to the non-toxic trivalent state. To this end, methods such as chemical reduction, chemical precipitation and coagulation have been used. However, these methods are limited by poor removal efficiency, formation of secondary pollutants (sludge), and are mostly applicable to aqueous solutions. Recently, electrochemical methods have been investigated for reducing hexavalent chromium, but there is a lack of data on the reduction of …

Louisiana Agriculture Summer, 2021, Lsu Agcenter

Louisiana Agriculture

No abstract provided.

Northwest- Summer 2021, Lsu Agcenter

Horticulture Hints

No abstract provided.

Safety Of Vulnerable Road Users (Vru's) In Light-Rail Transit (Lrt) Environment, Samir Ahmed, Rifat Bulut

Publications

Light-rail transit (LRT), which includes modern streetcars, trolleys, and heritage trolleys, is one of the fastest growing modes of public transportation in the United States. To reduce the cost and complexity of construction, most LRT systems have their tracks placed on city streets, in medians, or in separate at-grade rights-of-way with at-grade crossings. Operating light-rail vehicles (LRVs) along these alignments introduces new conflicts and increases the risk of collisions with vulnerable road users (VRUs) including pedestrians, bicyclists, and electric scooter riders. This study has two main objectives: (1) to review and evaluate the existing body of knowledge and the state …

Factors Protecting Against A Decline In Physical Activity During The Covid-19 Pandemic, S. Nicole Fearnbach, Emily W. Flanagan, Christoph Höchsmann, Robbie A. Beyl, Abby D. Altazan, Corby K. Martin, Leanne M. Redman

Clinical Research Faculty Publications

Purpose The spread of COVID-19 and the associated stay-At-home orders and shutdowns of gyms and fitness centers have drastically influenced health behaviors leading to widespread reductions in physical activity (PA). The recent Call to Action from the American College of Sports Medicine has promoted "innovative strategies to promote PA during the COVID-19 pandemic."We aimed to identify individual-level factors that protected against declines in PA levels amid the COVID-19 restrictions. Methods We used the Pennington Biomedical COVID-19 Health Behaviors Survey for our analyses and used mixed-effect linear and generalized linear models to estimate the effects of individual-level factors on changes in …

Policing Understood As A Racial Project: An Exploration Of The Role Law Enforcement Has Played In The Shaping Of Race Relations In The United States, Jahaan Chandler

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Law enforcement and minority communities have had a complicated history in the United States to say the least. The theoretical propositions used to explain the myriad of interlocking relationships between race, criminal activity, neighborhood disorder, public perceptions of crime, and law enforcement itself, have provided us with nuggets of insight that have all contributed to enhancing our understanding of crime and policing in the U.S., but none have provided an overall interpretation of this complex and often convoluted relationship. This dissertation seeks to rectify this issue by not only examining the history of law enforcement and its relation to minority …

Simulation Of Compound Flood Events In Low-Gradient Coastal Watershed, Felix Luis Santiago-Collazo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Low-gradient coastal watersheds are susceptible to flooding caused by various flows such as rainfall, tides, and storm surge. Compound flooding occurs when at least two of these mechanisms happen simultaneously or in close succession. Different inundation models, observed data, and/or a combination of these are coupled through varying techniques involving one-way, loosely, tightly, or fully coupled approaches to assess compound flooding. This study presents a one-dimensional (1-D), fully coupled compound inundation model based on the Shallow Water equations. This model approach simultaneously simulates the free water surface variations in the ocean domain (i.e., tide and storm surge modeling), rainfall-runoff in …

The Young Age And Plant-Based Diet Hypothesis For Low Sars-Cov-2 Infection And Covid-19 Pandemic In Sub-Saharan Africa, J N. Losso, M N. Losso, M Toc, J N. Inungu, J N. Losso

Faculty Publications

Since the outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that caused the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), in December 2019, the infection has spread around the globe. Some of the risk factors include social distancing, mask wearing, hand washing with soap, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, asthma, cardiovascular disease, and dysbiosis. Evidence has shown the incidence of total infection and death rates to be lower in sub-Saharan Africa when compared with North Africa, Europe and North America and many other parts of the world. The higher the metabolic syndrome rate, the higher the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Africa has a lower …

The Cryptid Tourist Gaze: Cryptid Tourism And The Performance Of Monster-Hunting, Sara Brooke Christian

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Cryptid Tourist Gaze: Cryptid Tourism and the Performance of Monster-Hunting examines different modes of monster-hunting and argues that the ways of hunting for monsters has evolved from major expeditions to cryptid tourism. I devised an original term called the Cryptid Tourist Gaze in order to analyze these different monster-hunting modes. The Cryptid Tourist Gaze is an individual's perspective of and experience with a cryptid monster and reflects how an individual perceives and presents cryptid monsters and cryptid monster experiences.

I suggest that individuals now perform monster-hunting through documentary media consumption, festival attendance, and museum curation and visitation, which are …

Using Distributed Techology To Make Music In The Time Of The Attention Economy, Tate Carson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Sounds Aware is a mobile web app that allows users to record soundwalks and share them so that other people can experience them. The creator of the soundwalk records their perceptions of the restorativeness of a specific place on the walk, these answers are then sonified for whoever experiences the walk later to hear. Sounds Aware aims to be a social app that is restorative to our attention. It does this by encouraging experience of nature and by using decentralized technology that exists outside of the attention economy.

The attention economy is discussed as a force that exists within much …

Review Of Girl In The Walls, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Louisiana Digital Library Collections As Data Outro Survey: Selected Survey Results To Support Reports And Publications, Sl Ziegler, Leah Powell Duncan, Elizabeth Joan Kelly

Faculty Publications

Selected survey results pertaining to the effectiveness of the Louisiana Digital Library Collections as Data grant deliverables.

Peridynamics-Based Discrete Element Method (Peridem) Model Of Granular Systems Involving Breakage Of Arbitrarily Shaped Particles, Prashant K. Jha, Prathamesh S. Desai, Debdeep Bhattacharya, Robert Lipton

Faculty Publications

Usage, manipulation, transport, delivery, and mixing of granular or particulate media, comprised of spherical or polyhedral particles, is commonly encountered in industrial sectors of construction (cement and rock fragments), pharmaceutics (tablets), and transportation (ballast). Elucidating particulate media's behavior in concert with particle attrition (i.e., particle wear and subsequent particle fragmentation) is essential for predicting the performance and increasing the efficiency of engineering systems using such media. Discrete element method (DEM) based techniques can describe the interaction between particles but cannot model intra-particle deformation, especially intra-particle fracture. On the other hand, peridynamics provides the means to account for intra-particle deformation and …

Effect Of Informed Conditions On Sensory Expectations And Actual Perceptions: A Case Of Chocolate Brownies Containing Edible-Cricket Protein, Cristhiam Gurdian, Damir Torrico, Bin Li, Georgianna Tuuri, Witoon Prinyawiwatkul

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Deep Learning Enhanced Novel Software Tool For Laryngeal Dynamics Analysis, Andreas M. Kist, Pablo Gómez, Denis Dubrovskiy, Patrick Schlegel, Melda Kunduk, Matthias Echternach, Rita Patel, Marion Semmler, Christopher Bohr, Stephan Dürr, Anne Schützenberger, Michael Döllinger

Faculty Publications

Purpose: High-speed videoendoscopy (HSV) is an emerging, but barely used, endoscopy technique in the clinic to assess and diagnose voice disorders because of the lack of dedicated software to analyze the data. HSV allows to quantify the vocal fold oscillations by segmenting the glottal area. This challenging task has been tackled by various studies; however, the proposed approaches are mostly limited and not suitable for daily clinical routine. Method: We developed a user-friendly software in C# that allows the editing, motion correction, segmentation, and quantitative analysis of HSV data. We further provide pretrained deep neural networks for fully automatic glottis …

Female Mice Are Protected From Metabolic Decline Associated With Lack Of Skeletal Muscle Hur, Allison C. Stone, Robert C. Noland, Randall L. Mynatt, Samuel E. Velasquez, David S. Bayless, Eric Ravussin, Jaycob D. Warfel

Division of Basic Science Faculty Publications

Male mice lacking HuR in skeletal muscle (HuRm−/−) have been shown to have decreased gastrocnemius lipid oxidation and increased adiposity and insulin resistance. The same consequences have not been documented in female HuRm−/− mice. Here we examine this sexually dimorphic phenotype. HuRm−/− mice have an increased fat mass to lean mass ratio (FM/LM) relative to controls where food intake is similar. Increased body weight for male mice correlates with increased blood glucose during glucose tolerance tests (GTT), suggesting increased fat mass in male HuRm−/− mice as a driver of decreased glucose clearance. However, HuRm−/− female mice show decreased blood glucose …

Load Balancing For Distributed Nonlocal Models Within Asynchronous Many-Task Systems, Pranav Gadikar, Patrick Diehl, Prashant K. Jha

Faculty Publications

In this work, we consider the challenges of developing a distributed solver for models based on nonlocal interactions. In nonlocal models, in contrast to the local model, such as the wave and heat partial differential equations, the material interacts with neighboring points on a larger-length scale compared to the mesh discretization. In developing a fully distributed solver, the interaction over a length scale greater than mesh size introduces additional data dependencies among the compute nodes and communication bottleneck. In this work, we carefully look at these challenges in the context of nonlocal models; to keep the presentation specific to the …

Unchurched Christian Nationalism And The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election*, Samuel Stroope, Paul Froese, Heather M. Rackin, Jack Delehanty

Faculty Publications

Prior research found that Christian nationalism was strongly associated with voting for Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. However, the effects of Christian nationalism may depend on voters’ religiosity. Using national data, we assess whether the association between Christian nationalism and Trump support differed for churchgoers and nonchurchgoers and find that Christian nationalism is not significantly associated with Trump support among churchgoing voters. Instead, Christian nationalism is only significantly associated with Trump support among unchurched voters. These results suggest that while religious sentiments remain key correlates of political attitudes and behavior in the United States, these ties may have …

Oocyte Specific Lncrna Variant Rose Influences Oocyte And Embryo Development, Rajan Iyyappan, Daria Aleshkina, Linkai Zhu, Zongliang Jiang, Veronika Kinterova, Andrej Susor

Faculty Publications

Fully grown mammalian oocytes store a large amount of RNA synthesized during the transcriptionally active growth stage. A large part of the stored RNA belongs to the long non-coding class which contain either transcriptional noise or important contributors to cellular physiology. Despite the expanding number of studies related to lncRNAs, their influence on oocyte physiology remains enigmatic. We found an oocyte specific antisense, long non-coding RNA, “Rose” (lncRNA in Oocyte Specifically Expressed) expressed in two variants containing two and three non-coding exons, respectively. Rose is localized in the nucleus of transcriptionally active oocyte and in embryo with polysomal occupancy in …

The Undiscovered Country, Luke A. Atkinson

LSU Master's Theses

The Undiscovered Country is a compendium of paintings, prose, and poetry that defines the place of creation. This work is a response to life as I find it, in as honest and truthful a way as my ability allows. Sergei Prokofiev said, “The more the sea rages, the more precious a hard rock among the waves becomes.” My paintings are solid rocks that I cling to. Hopefully, someone else can too.

Blowout - Capping - Fracturing - Relief Well, A Full Cycle Workflow, Youssuf A. Elnoamany

LSU Master's Theses

Broaching is defined as the uncontrolled release of hydrocarbons to ocean seafloor after a loss of subsurface well control event. Failed attempts to cap the offshore wells undergoing worst case discharge may lead to hydraulic fracture initiation and subsequent propagation, leading to renewed release of hydrocarbon to the seafloor. During the capping stack shut-in process, pressure build-up will occur along the wellbore, exposing locations of possible fracture initiation to overpressurized fluid, such as directly below the casing shoe, and critical points along the well casing. Shall there be enough build-up pressure to exceed the minimum horizontal stress in an exposed …

Disentangling The Effects Of Vapor Pressure Deficit And Soil Water Availability On Canopy Conductance In A Seasonal Tropical Forest During The 2015 El Niño Drought, Yilin Fang, L. Ruby Leung, Brett T. Wolfe, Matteo Detto, Ryan G. Knox, Nate G. Mcdowell, Charlotte Grossiord, Chonggang Xu, Bradley O. Christoffersen, Pierre Gentine, Charles D. Koven, Jeffrey Q. Chambers

Faculty Publications

Water deficit in the atmosphere and soil are two key interactive factors that constrain transpiration and vegetation productivity. It is not clear which of these two factors is more important for the water and carbon flux response to drought stress in ecosystems. In this study, field data and numerical modeling were used to isolate their impact on evapotranspiration (ET) and gross primary productivity (GPP) at a tropical forest site in Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, focusing on their response to the drought induced by the El Niño event of 2015–2016. Numerical simulations were performed using a plant hydrodynamic scheme (HYDRO) …

Wildfires: Vegetation Recovery And The Potential For Future Fires, Moses Okonkwo

LSU Master's Theses

Analysis of satellite imagery combined with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), often allows for observing the increasing changes in land cover dynamics. These changes are often on a macro scale buoyed by natural hazards such as wildfires. This study examines the vegetation recovery dynamics by using multispectral data and also gleaned insight in the applications of Hyperspectral satellite imagery in the study of vegetation dynamics. Both Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) (multispectral) and the Earth-Observing One (EO-1) (hyperspectral) data are freely available; however the former has a limited spatial and temporal coverage. The relationship between vegetation recovery, elevation, aspect and …