Digital Commons Network^™

Characterization Of Native And Bypass Human Coronary Artery Plaque Deposits From The Same Heart: Investigation Of The Chemical Form Of Calcium In Human Coronary Artery Plaque Deposits, Serigne Thiam

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Gradual deposits of lipids, proteins, and calcium on the coronary arterial walls cause atherosclerosis, leading to blockage of the blood flow and possible heart attack. Despite many studies, the mechanism underlying these processes remains unclear. In this research, differences between native and bypass plaque deposits from the same heart were examined. In addition, the crystalline and the amorphous plaques within these native and bypass vessels were characterized. The techniques used to characterize the deposits included inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS), solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), etc. The results from the ICPMS technique showed that …

The Institutional Determinants Of Property Regime Change In New Democracies: The Russian Federation, Hungary, And Czechoslovakia, R. Vanessa Krasner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Is there a relationship between the design of democratic institutions and optimal collective decisions? Optimum decisions are defined as achieving goals important to the transition such as deep and equitable property reforms. Democratic institutions refer to first-order institutions of governance and the electoral rules for choosing leaders. Overseeing both are the written or "parchment" constitutions. Constitutions are designed to distribute power among actors, generate efficiency, and govern the interactions among actors. My findings showed that constitutional designs intentionally and sometimes with unanticipated consequences can result in highly cooperative, competitive, or conflictual struggles by political actors over high-stakes distributive issues such …

So-Journeying: Creating Sacred Space In Education, Tayari Kwa Salaam

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research questions current taken-for-granted meanings given to school, education, teaching and curriculum from an African/African American perspective. This inquiry is based on my experiences as an African American woman curriculum theorist committed to the education of African American youth. Drawing on the lifework of Sojourner Truth, a nineteenth century African American woman abolitionist and human rights activist, this work seeks to explore aspects of both African/African American-centered education and curriculum theory as a means of informing understandings of school, education, teaching and curriculum. My research question is: How does Sojourner Truth inform curriculum theory? This inquiry is a self-exploration …

The Louisiana Calf-To-Carcass Program: Growth And Carcass Traits, James E. Devillier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Feedlot and carcass data from 1,533 weanling steers consigned to the Louisiana Calf-to-Carcass program from 1992 to 1998 were used to evaluate the influence of feeder calf grade, sire breed, and initial feedlot weight on growth and carcass traits. Each October, spring born calves were delivered to Clinton, Ruston, or Lake Charles loadout sites. Steers were identified by sire breed, tagged, weighed, assigned a feeder calf grade. Forty-six, 18, 26, and 10 percent of the steers graded large frame-thick muscle, large frame-moderate muscle, medium frame-thick muscle, and medium frame-moderate muscle, respectively. Steers were trucked to a commercial feedlot and sorted …

Black Willow (Salix Nigra) Use In Phytoremediation Techniques To Remove The Herbicide Bentazon From Shallow Groundwater, Robert Mark Conger

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Wetland environments have been impacted by the activities of man over the past several hundred years in North America. Industrialization into wetland areas has brought with it anthropogenic compounds that have been released into soils and groundwater. The use of phytoremediation to detoxify soil and groundwater began in the mid 1990's and has become a popular remediation technology. In 1994, a feasibility study for using phytoremediation in such an industrialized wetland area was conducted at a petrochemical facility at BASF Corporation, located about 20 kilometers south of Baton Rouge, Louisiana in Ascension Parish. The test site consisted of low level …

Beyond The Solid South: Southern Members Of Congress And The Vietnam War, Mark David Carson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

From the beginning of America's involvement in Vietnam in 1943 to its disastrous end in 1975, southern members of Congress exerted a significant influence on and expressed divergent opinions about Cold War foreign policy. In part because of an enormous increase in military spending in the South fueled by prominent membership on military committees, congressional hawks were more inclined to support military aid for countries fighting communism and accept military over civilian advice in prosecuting the Cold War. Hawkish southerners embraced containment wholeheartedly, exhibited an intense patriotism, and concerned themselves with upholding personal and national honor. Therefore, with some prominent …

Control Of Transport Dynamics In Overlay Networks, Qishi Wu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Transport control is an important factor in the performance of Internet protocols, particularly in the next generation network applications involving computational steering, interactive visualization, instrument control, and transfer of large data sets. The widely deployed Transport Control Protocol is inadequate for these tasks due to its performance drawbacks. The purpose of this dissertation is to conduct a rigorous analytical study on the design and performance of transport protocols, and systematically develop a new class of protocols to overcome the limitations of current methods. Various sources of randomness exist in network performance measurements due to the stochastic nature of network traffic. …

Population Structure And Genetics Of Longevity In A Colony Of Dog Guides, John B. Cole

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The objectives of this study were the description of changes in genetic diversity in a colony of dog guides since its founding, and the investigation of the genetics of longevity in that population. Two breeds of dog, German Shepherds (GS) and Labrador Retrievers (LR), were evaluated. There were rapid increases in average pairwise relationship in both breeds, although the average was approximately one-third higher in the GS population than in the LR population. A similar trend was observed for average inbreeding. In the current generation, relationship and inbreeding for all animals averaged 25.3% and 26.2% in GS and 15.5% and …

The Trouble With Girls: Autoethnography And The Classroom, Pamela Kay Autrey

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Recent research suggests that many young women are undergoing a particularly difficult time during early adolescence, beginning with the transition to middle school (The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University [CASA], 2003; Albert, Brown, & Flanigan, 2003; American Association of University Women, 1992). Employing autoethnography, I studied my experience as girl and woman, student and teacher, in elementary and middle schools and how these informed my pedagogical practices and knowledge as an elementary school teacher. Drawing upon feminist theory and cultural studies as well as research narratives, I argue for the inclusion of "kinderculture" in the …

The Effects Of Employee Service Quality Provision And Customer Personality Traits On Customer Participation, Satisfaction, And Repurchase Intentions, Jeannie Denise John

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research investigates customer-employee interaction during service encounters, and whether the relationships between customer personality traits and quality of the employee’s service delivery will impact the customer’s participation, satisfaction, and repurchase intentions. Consumer personality is differentiated in terms of the self-monitoring (Snyder 1987) and locus of control (Rotter 1966) traits. Service quality provision is manipulated in terms of technical versus functional quality inputs, and whether these inputs are provided in a positive (i.e., good/superior) or negative (i.e., bad/poor) manner. These manipulations yield four combinations of service quality inputs: 1) positive technical and functional quality inputs; 2) positive technical, but negative …

Block-Level Discrete Cosine Transform Coefficients For Autonomic Face Recognition, Willie L. Scott, Ii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents a novel method of autonomic face recognition based on the recently proposed biologically plausible network of networks (NoN) model of information processing. The NoN model is based on locally parallel and globally coordinated transformations. In the NoN architecture, the neurons or computational units form distributed networks, which themselves link to form larger networks. In the general case, an n-level hierarchy of nested distributed networks is constructed. This models the structures in the cerebral cortex described by Mountcastle and the architecture based on that proposed for information processing by Sutton. In the implementation proposed in the dissertation, the …

A Role For Constitutive Pathogen Resistance5 In Promoting Cell Expansion In Arabidopsis Thaliana, Ginger Marie Brininstool

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Arabidopsis thaliana is a model organism used for genetic, molecular, and biochemical analyses of higher plant processes. Leaf hairs (trichomes) on the surface of Arabidopsis leaves are macroscopic single cells that develop by elaborate cell expansion and differentiation of the epidermis. Arabidopsis trichomes provide an excellent model to study plant cell expansion and differentiation and the cell cycle. Upon maturation, an Arabidopsis trichome becomes a branched, stellate structure with a highly birefringent cell wall. Arabidopsis mutants have been isolated that have trichomes that look glassy and have reduced birefringence. CONSTITUTIVE PATHOGEN RESISTANCE5 (CPR5) is a previously isolated Arabidopsis gene observed …

The Means Of Ignorance: Genuine Dialogue And A Rhetoric Of Virtue, Daniel Anthony Grano

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Aimed at core problems of contemporary moral rhetoric - pluralistic argument, incommensurable disagreement on ordering terms, and a theoretical move away from essence to relativism - this study is an attempt to restore rhetoric as an art capable of investigating and positing terms of order and being. This restoration relies upon viewing rhetoric as a practice of epistemic mediation between the experiential and language-based knowledge of the local, and the perfected knowledge of the Absolute. I propose characteristically Socratic notions of contingency and ignorance as the bases for this mediated approach. As a recognition of what is unknown and uncertain …

Assia Djebar. Le Corps Invisible: Voir Sans Etre Vue, Anna Rocca

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis traces the evolution of attitudes towards the body, desire, autobiography, and self-affirmation, in three novels of Assia Djebar: L'amour, la fantasia, Vaste est la prison, and Les nuits de Strasbourg. The three novels share a common trait: the narrators' will to express their body and their desires. This body, which is simultaneously anonymous and concealed, is at the very center of a contradiction; it is often relegated to representation as a ghost without any corporeal reality. It is been our objective to follow the narrators' introspective reflection on the multiple relationships between Algerian women and public space, designated …

The Extinction Properties Of Reddened Galactic Ob Sightlines, Lynne Angela Valencic

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A solid understanding of dust grains and their extinction properties is needed to better remove the effects of extinction from data and to comprehend the nature of the processes which modify grains. This requires a large sample of Galactic sightlines, extending far beyond the solar neighborhood, sampling not only a large volume of space but also a wide variety of environments. To fulfill this requirement, a database of sightlines toward 426 young, reddened stars was constructed using extinction curves based on IUE spectra. The curves were fit and the Fitzpatrick-Massa (FM) parameters were found. FM parameters allow for a quantitative …

A Critical Analysis Of Female Doctoral Student Advisement: Implications For Program Satisfaction, Angele Marie Thibodeaux

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to seek a greater understanding of the female doctoral student experience. In particular, the emphasis of this study is on exploring the dynamics and consequences of the advisor/advisee relationships that female doctoral students experience. This study was designed to address the role of ethnicity and gender in: (a) the selection of an advisor; (b) the quality and characteristics of the advisor/advisee relationship; (c) the impact of the advisor/advisee relationships on program satisfaction; and (d) the impact of external factors on the advisor/advisee relationship and academic experience of female doctoral students. To accomplish this goal, …

Collective Efficacy: A Framework For Understanding Classroom Teacher's Perceptions Of Integrating Physical Activity, Melissa Ann Park

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Children’s physical inactivity is becoming an important health concern, and it has been suggested by professionals that school programs can be important in the effort to increase activity levels. Physical education specialists cannot achieve the goal of significantly increasing children’s activity in isolation, and it is apparent that whole school programs at the elementary level have the potential to foster active lifestyles. If those programs are to be successful, all school personnel must play a role, so it is important to find ways to facilitate their involvement. The purpose of this study was to use collective efficacy as a framework …

Quantitative Inheritance Of Calpastatin Activity As An Assessment Measure For Meat Tenderness In Brahman Steers, Fuad Mohammad Tawfiq Odeh

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Calpastatin activity at 24 h postmortem is inversely proportional to postmortem tenderization and accounts for a greater proportion of the variation in beef tenderness. Tenderness was determined by measurement of 24 h postmortem longissimus muscle calpastatin activity (CA) and Warner-Bratzler shear force after 7 and 14 d of steak aging. The quantitative inheritance of tenderness in Brahman steers was investigated phenotypically by Multiple Trait Derivative-Free Restricted Maximum Likelihood (MTDFREML) procedures and genotypically by using restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLP), a microsatellite marker, and DNA sequence analyses. In experiment 1, MTDFREML was used to obtain the genetic parameters of tenderness traits …

Introduction Of The 305Arg→305Ser Mutation In The Large Extrinsic Loop E Of The Cp43 Protein Of Synechocystis Sp. Pcc 6803 Leads To The Loss Of Cytochrome C550 Binding To Photosystem Ii, Terry M. Bricker, Andrew Young, Laurie K. Frankel, Cindy Putnam-Evans

Faculty Publications

CP43, a component of Photosystem II (PSII) in higher plants, algae and cyanobacteria, is encoded by the psbC gene. Previous work demonstrated that alteration of an arginine residue occurring at position 305 to serine produced a strain (R305S) with altered PSII characteristics including lower oxygen-evolving activity, fewer assembled reaction centers, higher sensitivity to photoinactivation, etc. [Biochemistry 38 (1999) 1582]. Additionally, it was determined that the mutant exhibited an enhanced stability of its S2 state. Recently, we observed a significant chloride effect under chloride-limiting conditions. The mutant essentially lost the ability to grow photoautotrophically, assembled fewer fully functional PSII reaction centers …

Phylogeny Of Acridocarpus-Brachylophon (Malpighiaceae): Implications For Tertiary Tropical Floras And Afroasian Biogeography, Charles C. Davis, Charles D. Bell, Peter W. Fritsch, Sarah Mathews

Faculty Publications

A major tenet of African Tertiary biogeography posits that lowland rainforest dominated much of Africa in the late Cretaceous and was replaced by xeric vegetation as a response to continental uplift and consequent widespread aridification beginning in the late Paleogene. The aridification of Africa is thought to have been a major factor in the extinction of many African humid-tropical lineages, and in the present-day disparity of species diversity between Africa and other tropical regions. This primarily geologically based model can be tested with independent phylogenetic evidence from widespread African plant groups containing both humid- and xeric-adapted species. We estimated the …

The Power Of Place, Morgan N. Knull

Civil War Book Review

The Power of Place

A Large-Area Ccd Camera For The Schmidt Telescope At The Venezuelan National Astronomical Observatory, C. Baltay, J. A. Snyder, P. Andrews, W. Emmet, B. Schaefer, J. Sinnott, C. Bailyn, P. Coppi, A. Oemler, C. N. Sabbey, S. Sofia, W. Van Altena, A. K. Vivas, C. Abad, A. Bongiovanni, C. Briceño, G. Bruzual, F. Della Prugna, G. Magris, Ge Sánchez, Gu Sánchez, H. Schenner, J. Stock, B. Adams, M. Gebhard, R. K. Honeycutt, J. Musser, A. Rengstorff, I. Ferrin, F. Fuenmayor, J. Hernandez, O. Naranjo, P. Rosenzweig

Faculty Publications

We have designed, constructed, and put into operation a large-area CCD camera that covers a large fraction of the image plane of the 1 m Schmidt telescope at Llano del Hato in Venezuela. The camera consists of 16 CCD devices arranged in a 4 × 4 mosaic covering 2.°3 × 3.°5 of sky. The CCDs are 2048 × 2048 LORAL devices with 15 μm pixels. The camera is optimized for drift-scan photometry and objective-prism spectroscopy. The design considerations, construction features, and performance parameters are described in the following paper.

The C-Function For Non-Compactly Causal Symmetric Spaces, Bernhard Krötz, Gestur Ólafsson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wave Packet Spreading: Temperature And Squeezing Effects With Applications To Quantum Measurement And Decoherence, G. W. Ford, R. F. O'Connell

Faculty Publications

A localized free particle is represented by a wave packet and its motion is discussed in most quantum mechanics textbooks. Implicit in these discussions is the assumption of zero temperature. We discuss how the effects of finite temperature and squeezing can be incorporated in an elementary manner. The results show how the introduction of simple tools and ideas can bring the reader into contact with topics at the frontiers of research in quantum mechanics. We discuss the standard quantum limit, which is of interest in the measurement of small forces, and decoherence of a mixed ("Schrödinger cat") state, which has …

Association Of Swim Distance And Age With Body Composition In Adult Female Swimmers, Georgianna Tuuri, Mark Loftin, Jeffrey Oescher

Faculty Publications

Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to examine the relationship between average weekly swimming distance and age with body composition in adult female endurance swimmers. Methods: Thirty-five women, aged 21-73 yr. volunteered to participate. Weekly swimming distance was determined from a self-reported exercise log. Body composition was estimated by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA), waist circumference, abdominal sagittal diameter, and skinfold thickness measures. Associations between swimming distance and age with body composition were examined using regression analysis. Results: Swimming distance had shared variances as follows: 23% with percent body fat, 26% with waist circumference, 20% with abdominal sagittal diameter, and …

Between History And Fiction, Laura Ng

Civil War Book Review

Unfortunately fiction and history, both the products of our contemplation, compilation, and creativity, have not always been happy bedfellows. Historians fear that writers will abandon all facts, as William Faulkner seems to advocate: "I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you....

Perspectives In History: Gary W. Gallagher Probes Perceptions Of Confederate History, Bonnie L. Bates

Civil War Book Review

Civil War Book Review (cwbr): Which do you find more informative about Lee from an historical standpoint: his military strategy or his writings? Gary W. Gallagher (gg): Both afford numerous insights into Lee's military personality. Strategically, he almost always sought to f....

War Is All Hell, James I. Robertson Jr.

Civil War Book Review

'War is all Hell'

Homeward Bound: The Demobilization Of The Union And Confederate Armies, 1865-1866, Terrence J. Winschel

Civil War Book Review

Long road home

The transformation from soldier to civilian

Annotations, Cwbr_Editor

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.