Digital Commons Network^™

Une Rose Des Vents Politique: The Southern Winds Of Jean Genet’S Poetic Compass, Joanne Brueton

Artl@s Bulletin

Iconoclastic French dissident, Jean Genet, notoriously channelled his hatred of the West as a way to discover the South. This article reads Genet’s admiration for the Palestinians as more than just a foil to the imperialist hegemony of a French homeland he reviled; but as a relation of equality that debunks the oppression of North-South dialectics. Tackling Éric Marty and Ivan Jablonka’s accusations of anti-Semitism, as well as criticisms of Orientalism, I use Genet’s 1982 essay ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’ to argue that his Palestinian texts radically re-orient the political compass where the North constructs and reifies a one-dimensional South.

More Anatomically Realistic And Quantitative Models Of Pulmonary Surfactant Action And Alveolar Stability, Charles F. Babbs

Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering Faculty Working Papers

To explore basic mechanisms of action of pulmonary surfactant in preventing alveolar collapse, a first-principles analysis is done analyzing forces on the shared walls separating adjacent alveolar gas bubbles. The analysis holds for concave alveolar models with either rounded, dome-like surfaces or flat, box-like surfaces. The analysis also holds for neighboring alveoli of varying size and shape. Surfactant action is characterized by two parameters describing reduction in surface tension vs. log concentration. The resulting equations describe the net pressure tending to shift the shared position of a wall, as a function of the perturbation from a balanced initial state. In …

Project-Based Learning (Pjbl) In Three Southeastern Public Schools: Academic, Behavioral, And Social-Emotional Outcomes, Brooke T. Culclasure, Kyle C. Longest, Troy M. Terry

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

Project-based learning (PjBL) as a PK–12 instructional model is growing nationwide. PjBL is seen as a mechanism to deliver academic content in a more engaging way for students and in a way that stresses the development of skills critical to success in the 21st-century workforce. Because of its increasing popularity and the disparate breadth of research around the model, a study of PjBL in three southeastern public schools was conducted during academic years 2015–2016 and 2016–2017. This study attempted to better understand how PjBL was implemented in schools and to explore the impact of PjBL on schools, teachers, and students. …

The Impact Of Pbl As A Stem School Reform Model, Michael R. L. Odell, Teresa J. Kennedy, Eric Stocks

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

Project/problem-based learning (PBL) can provide an effective model for school reform when implemented with fidelity. In the report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, it was recommended that if the U.S. is to remain competitive in the 21st-century economy, there must be a serious effort to “enlarge the pipeline of students who are prepared to enter college and graduate with a degree in STEM” (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, & Institute of Medicine, 2007, p. 6). The report included the recommendation that states develop statewide specialty STEM high schools (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, …

Implementing And Evaluating A Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (Cure) At A Hispanic-Serving Institution, Michele I. Shuster Phd, Jennifer Curtiss, Timothy F. Wright, Camilla Champion, Maryam Sharifi, Judith Bosland

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

We are examining the impact of a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) at a land-grant, Hispanic-serving institution in the southwestern United States. Students in our CURE completed one or two extended research projects over a single semester. Our CURE enrolled a high proportion of underrepresented minority students (70.3%), including 60.2% Hispanic students. One year after CURE completion, 31.5% of CURE students had graduated with a STEM degree, and 54.3% were enrolled in a STEM major. Pre- and postcourse surveys of indicators of persistence including scientific self-efficacy, scientific identity, valuing scientific community objectives, and intention to persist showed positive shifts. Impacts …

Collision Avoidance With Deep Reinforcement Learning, Raymond C. Li, Jun Min Ahn, Zachary Tyler Esteron, Qiyin Hong

Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference

In the past decade, learning algorithms developed to play video games better than humans have become more common. Google’s DeepMind Technologies developed learning algorithms that could play Atari video games and also demonstrated their famous AlphaGo algorithm which outperformed professional Go players. However, little research has been done on learning algorithms developed to complete the particularly difficult single-player games. In particular, much further research could be done on developing learning algorithms for mechanically challenging games such as “bullet hell” games. We believe that agents could learn to efficiently evade obstacles utilizing deep reinforcement learning. The purpose of this study is …

Source Identification Of A Bladeless Fan By Using Sonah In Cylindrical Coordinates, Weimin Thor, J Stuart Bolton, Tongyang Shi

Publications of the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories

Near-field acoustical holography (NAH) is conventionally used to visualize sound fields in a three-dimensional space based on sound pressure measurements conducted on a surface close to a noise source. Traditional Fourier-based acoustical holography procedures require the use of a large microphone array setup to avoid spatial truncation effects: that means it is necessary that the array be large enough so that the sound pressure level measured at the edges of the array is significantly lower than that at the peak locations. To avoid the need to use large microphone arrays, a method referred to as statistically optimized near-field acoustical holography …

Study On Thecone Programming Reformulation Of Active Noise Control Filter Design In The Frequency Domain, Yongjie Zhuang, Yangfan Liu

Publications of the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories

In the practice of active noise control, the control filter can be designed in either the time domain or the frequency domain. Compared with the former method category, it is more convenient to use frequency-domain methods to apply constraints such as stability, robustness, disturbance enhancement, input limit of loudspeakers, etc. Better noise reduction performance can usually be achieved by frequency-domain design as well. However, the computational complexity of designing a filter in the frequency domain is usually significant, especially for multichannel systems with multiple constraints. This is one of the challenges of using frequency-domain design in practical applications. In this …

Factory Optimization Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Ai, Shivam Duhan, Chengming Zhang, Wenyu Jing, Mingqi Li

Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference

The long-standing goal of factory optimization is to find optimal machine and conveyor belt placement to maximize the efficiency of the assembly line. We are developing a reinforcement learning agent to play Factorio, a game where you build and maintain factories, without prior domain knowledge. Factorio is the perfect environment for deep reinforcement learning as it supports extensive modification using an in-game debugging mode which allows our agent to interface with the game effortlessly. The reinforcement learning agent implements a policy of actions based on the reward function, continuously optimizing towards incremental goals specified by the user. The ultimate goal …

Fracture Networks On Mars: Preservation Of Surface And Subsurface Environments At Mawrth Vallis, Phoebe Kinzelman

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

Mawrth Vallis is an outflow channel on Mars that cuts through some of the planet’s most ancient terrains, which contain many different types of fractures. The ExoMars rover mission will search for biosignatures on Mars, and this site was proposed as one of the two final candidate landing sites for the rover. A biosignature is any object that shows evidence of past or present life. Fracture networks are a high priority for the mission because they might contain minerals precipitated by fluid interaction, and these minerals could trap and preserve biosignatures, critical for our understanding of ancient processes. In this …

Climatological Changes: Meteorological Parameters Affecting The Spatial Redistribution Of U.S. Tornadoes, Ashley Dicks

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

Climatological changes in the environments of key meteorological parameters that affect Significant Tornado Days (SigTorDs) have been determined for two active tornado regions defined as Box α and Box β, centered, respectively, over Oklahoma and Alabama and their respective environs. The North American Regional Reanalysis data was selected for 1980–2013, providing two successive 17-year periods corresponding to the last 34 years of previous research findings that focused on the aforementioned regions. This data record also corresponds to an increasing surface air temperature trend for the continental United States. Period I (1980–1996) and Period II (1997–2013) defined the years of changing …

Richard Owen: Scotland 1810, Indiana 1890, Victor Lincoln Albjerg

Purdue University Press Books

Richard Dale Owen was born in 1810 in Scotland to a wealthy textile manufacturer and philanthropist. The youngest of eight children, Richard grew up at the family estate of Braxfield House, where he received his early education from private tutors. He would later go on to study chemistry, physics, and natural sciences, among other subjects, traveling between Scotland and Switzerland for his schooling.

Owen arrived in the United States in 1828 to teach in New Haven, Indiana, where his father was running an experimental utopian community of happiness, enlightenment, and prosperity. He would later go on to be Indiana’s second …

The Dean: A Biography Of A. A. Potter, Robert B. Eckles

Purdue University Press Books

More than 20,000 engineering students at Purdue University have been touched in some way by the ides or the warm personality of Andrey A. Potter, who served for 33 years as dean of the Schools of Engineering at Purdue, the world’s largest engineering institution.

Awarded the honorary title of “Dean of the Deans of Engineering Universities” in 1949 by his alma mater, MIT, Potter has been a teacher for 48 years and a dean for 40. Among his thousands of colleagues at Kansas State, Purdue, and the professional societies he has headed, he is known with respect and affection simply …

Co-Designing A Programme Level Approach To Information And Digital Literacy: Initial Reflections From Our Participatory Action Research Project, Vicky Grant, Catherine A. Bazela, Alison V. Little

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Information and digital literacy (IDL) is a core graduate attribute at the University of Sheffield and is defined as follows: “Information and digital literacy (IDL) enables engaged learning. It blends information literacies with digital capabilities transcending technological skills and tools to identify with learning, living and working in a fluid digital world. IDL enables learners to discover and absorb information in a critically engaged manner, innovate in active pursuits of creative scholarship, demonstrate integrity by acknowledging the work of others and make a contribution for others to share” [University of Sheffield Library, 2019].

This paper will present initial reflections from …

The Push-Pull Of Digital Literacy, Jo Coldwell-Neilson, Kat Cain

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Digital literacy within higher education was originally grounded in Gilster’s (1997) definition that essentially framed it as information literacy using technologies. This has necessarily evolved over the past two decades in conjunction with rapid technological advances. Digital literacy concepts have attempted to match the changing landscape engendered by ubiquitous and ever more available technologies, where cybersecurity and accessibility, multimodal communication channels, and push-pull models of information delivery impact the way we learn, work and play. A dizzying plethora of digital literacy definitions has emerged, with no common understanding of what it means or what skills and capabilities it reflects. Concomitantly, …

Amorphous Solid Dispersion Formation Via Solvent Granulation – A Case Study With Ritonavir And Lopinavir, Niraj S. Tirasi, Sonal Bhujbal, Qi Tony Zhou, Lynne Taylor

Department of Industrial and Physical Pharmacy Faculty Publications

Herein, we evaluate the potential of using a simple solvent granulation process to prepare a binary drug amorphous solid dispersion (ASD) containing two anti-HIV drugs, ritonavir and lopinavir. The drugs were granulated onto a mixture of lactose and microcrystalline cellulose, followed by drying to remove the solvent. The resultant granules were characterized and each drug was found to be X-ray amorphous. No crystallization was observed following storage for 1 month under accelerated stability conditions (40 °C and 75% relative humidity). The dissolution behavior of the compacted granules was compared with the marketed formulation. The dissolution rate of ritonavir was found …

Subsurface Mimo: A Beamforming Design In Internet Of Underground Things For Digital Agriculture Applications, Abdul Salam

Computer Information Technology Faculty Publications

In underground (UG) multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO), the transmit beamforming is used to focus energy in the desired direction. There are three different paths in the underground soil medium through which the waves propagates to reach at the receiver. When the UG receiver receives a desired data stream only from the desired path, then the UG MIMO channel becomes three path (lateral, direct, and reflected) interference channel. Accordingly, the capacity region of the UG MIMO three path interference channel and degrees of freedom (multiplexing gain of this MIMO channel requires careful modeling). Therefore, expressions are required for the degree of …

Effect Of Project Lead The Way Participation On Retention In Engineering Degree Programs, Juliana Utley, Toni Ivey, John Weaver, Mary Jo Self

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

A key goal of pre-college engineering programs is to increase the number and retention of students pursuing engineering degrees. The researchers conducted a transcript analysis in order to compare the retention of entering engineering majors at a university based on whether or not they participated in Project Lead the Way (PLTW) in high school. PLTW Engineering is a high school pre-engineering curriculum that offers a series of courses to increase student awareness and scaffold an understanding of engineering design. The findings from this study offer little support regarding the impact of students’ PLTW participation on engineering degree completion. However, findings …

Best Strategy For Each Team In The Regular Season To Win Champion In The Knockout Tournament, Zijie Zhou

Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference

In 'J. Schwenk.(2018)What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament? Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly' , Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout) tournament. In particular, he showed that for a certain probability model for the outcomes of games it can be the case that the top seeded team would be less likely to win the tournament than the second seeded team. This raises the possibility that in certain situations it might be advantageous for a team to intentionally lose a game in an attempt to get a …

Trans-Trismethoxy Resveratrol Decreased Fat Accumulation Dependent On Fat-6 And Fat-7 In Caenorhabditis Elegans, Yiren Yue, Peiyi Shen, Amanda L. Chang, Weipeng Qi, Kee Hong Kim, Daeyoung Kim, Yeonhwa Park

Department of Food Science Faculty Publications

trans-Trismethoxy resveratrol (TMR) is a methyl analog of resveratrol. It is found to exhibit enhanced biological effects compared to resveratrol, such as inhibition of cancer cell growth and pro-apoptotic activities. However, the role of TMR in lipid metabolism is not fully understood. In this study, we used Caenorhabditis elegans, an in vivo nematode model which has been widely applied in disease research, including research on obesity, to investigate the effect of TMR on lipid metabolism. Treatment with TMR (100 and 200 μM) for 4 days significantly reduced triglyceride accumulation (14% and 20% reduction over the control, respectively) of C. elegans, …

A Systematic Review Of Studies On Educational Robotics, Saira Anwar, Nicholas Alexander Bascou, Muhsin Menekse, Asefeh Kardgar

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

There has been a steady increase in the number of studies investigating educational robotics and its impact on academic and social skills of young learners. Educational robots are used both in and out of school environments to enhance K–12 students’ interest, engagement, and academic achievement in various fields of STEM education. Some prior studies show evidence for the general benefits of educational robotics as being effective in providing impactful learning experiences. However, there appears to be a need to determine the specific benefits which have been achieved through robotics implementation in K–12 formal and informal learning settings. In this study, …

Thermodynamics Of Coherent Structures Near Phase Transitions, Julia M. Meyer

Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference

Phase transitions within large-scale systems may be modeled by using partial differential equations, in which system dynamics are captured by appropriate polynomial potentials. The ability to simulate and predict phase transition behavior has many applications, from material behaviors (e.g., liquid crystal phase transformations, coherent movement of granular materials) to traffic congestion. Coherent structures in these systems evolve along a single spatial dimension randomly through time; thus, the statistical behavior of these fields is of greater interest than particular system results. Past research focused on deriving solutions to the system probability density function (PDF) and verifying solutions for fourth-order and other …

Objective Muscular Fatigue Analysis In Minimally Invasive Surgeries, Rachel Harmon

Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference

Researchers are finding that minimally invasive surgeries, such as laparoscopic and robotic surgeries, commonly result in musculoskeletal neuromuscular injuries, muscular fatigue, and arthritic injury and pain. These surgeries allow for a quicker patient recovery time, but pose a hard physical toll on surgeons. If these problems are not prevented, they can impact the healthcare system by affecting operation schedules and the quality of surgeries. Studies were geared towards identifying physical symptoms and reducing pain and discomfort from different surgeries. Physical discomfort, postural stability, ergonomic issues, stress, surgeons’ activities, spinal motion, workload, and Electromyography (EMG) data were measured in order to …

Application Of Open-Path Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (Op-Ftir) To Measure Greenhouse Gas Concentrations From Agricultural Fields, Cheng-Hsien Lin, Richard H. Grant, Albert J. Heber, Cliff T. Johnston

Purdue University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund

Open-path Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (OP-FTIR) has often been used to measure hazardous or trace gases from hot point sources (e.g. volcano, industrial, or agricultural facilities) but seldom used to measure greenhouse gases (GHGs) from field-scale sources (e.g. agricultural soils). Closed-path mid-IR laser-based N₂O, nondispersive-IR CO₂ analysers, and OP-FTIR were used to measure concentrations of N₂O and CO₂ at a maize cropping system during 9–19 June 2014. To measure N₂O and CO₂ concentrations accurately, we developed a quantitative method of N₂O∕CO₂ analysis that minimized interferences from diurnal changes …

Actively Preventing Negative Transfer, Andrew Ulmer, Zohar Kapach, Daniel Merrick, Karthik Maiya, Abhay Sasidharan, Arshad Alikhan, David Dang

Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference

Transfer learning is a common technique used in a wide variety of deep learning applications. Transfer learning methods are typically used to make use of a source domain, where there is an abundance of labeled data, to make inferences in a target domain, where labeled data is scarce. In the digital age, improving a model’s ability to generalize knowledge gained from the massive amount of data available online to new contexts is crucial. Most new contexts of interest, like radiological scans, have very few labels, an obstacle that can be overcome with improved transfer learning methods. A basic transfer learning …

Reflection Learning With Neural Network Ensemble, Mars Gao

Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference

For the current architecture of neural networks, it usually requires a high training cost in time and computation. From our perspective, the current methods in deep learn- ing might not be optimal in architecture and it fails to have an effective learning strategy. To solve these problems, in this paper, we would like to introduce the Collaborative Neural Network Group (CNNG). CNNG is a series of neural networks that work collaboratively to handle different tasks separately in the same learning system. It is evolved from a single neural network by our designed algorithm — Reflection. In this way, based on …

Global Air Quality Trekkers: Clean Kitchen Study, Stephanie Schiavo, Samantha Dykhuis, Avalin Senefeld

Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference

Indoor air pollution is a widespread problem in Africa and is the leading cause of premature death in many African countries. This pollution is primarily caused by the burning of biomass fuels inside an enclosed kitchen in order to provide heat for cooking. Global Air Quality Trekkers is an undergraduate engineering team within the EPICS department at Purdue, and our goal is to create a kitchen design that utilizes natural ventilation to mitigate the amount of air pollutants present in these kitchens, specifically in Nandi, Kenya. This year, our goal is to analyze the ability of 9 different kitchen designs …

Gifted Assessments And Underrepresented Students: What Is The Best Means Of Assessment?, Julie Kim, Madeline Gavin

Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference

Evaluating Assessments for Elementary Level Gifted Students In the elementary level, the issue of underrepresentation of gifted students is commonly overlooked. Although we recognize that this issue is multi-determined, we focus on assessments that are currently used and might be considered ideal for detecting giftedness in elementary school students. Through detailed evaluation of six quantitative and qualitative assessments, we examine factors that may limit each assessment’s accuracy at identifying gifted students. Our analysis highlights how each measure gauges giftedness by addressing the purpose of each measure, its uses, and psychometric features. We suggest that multiple means of assessment may be …

Explaining National Trends In Terrestrial Water Storage, C. Bayan Bruss, Roshanak Nateghi, Benjamin F. Zaitchik

Purdue University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund

Access to fresh water is critical for human well-being, economic activity and, in some cases, political stability. Data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has been used to monitor variability and trends in total water storage. This makes it possible to associate changes in water storage with both climate variability and large scale water management. Recent research has shown that these trends can be associated, globally, with rainfall, irrigation, and climate model predictions. This research indicates a need for further investigation into specific human predictors of trends in terrestrial water storage. This paper presents the first global scale …

Dewey’S Ideas In Action! Continuing Professional Development In An International Community Of Practice, Sabrina R. Goldberg

Education and Culture

Drawing on Dewey’s concepts and thinking, a middle school mathematics teacher at The School at Columbia University describes her teaching practice and role as a field-based teacher-educator and professional development leader during EdTech Summit Africa. Through a first-person account of her experiences in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, South Africa, the author reflects on how professional development with technology was embraced and illuminates why the development of an international community of practice with primary, secondary, and tertiary teachers is evolving. The article is divided into four sections.