Digital Commons Network^™

Practical Model For Improved Classification Of Trace Chemical Residues On Surfaces In Active Spectroscopic Measurements, Cara P. Murphy, John Kerekes, Derek Wood, Anish Goyal

Articles

Trace chemical detection and classification in stand-off reflection-based spectro- scopic data is challenging due to the variability of measured data and the lack of physics-based models that can accurately predict spectra. Most available models assume that the chemical takes the form of spherical particles or uniform thin films. A more realistic chemical presentation that could be encountered is that of a nonuniform chemical film that is deposited after evaporation of the solvent that contained the chemical. We present an improved signature model for this type of solid film. The proposed model, called sparse transfer matrix, includes a log-normal distribution of …

Improvement Of Durability And Sliding Properties Of Food Packaging Equipment By Combined Treatment Of Diamond-Like Carbon Coating And Fine Particle Bombarding, Kotono Mikamoto, Tomoko Nishitani, Yuta Tsubaki, Akira Shirakura, Tetsuya Suzuki

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

Recently, there is a demand for the development of an eco-friendly surface treatment technology that can replace PTFE coating and hard chrome plating, which are a common process for food packaging equipment. We intended to improve the sliding properties and wear resistance of food packaging equipment by the fine particle bombarding (FPB) process to a metal substrate and depositing diamond like carbon thin film under atmospheric pressure (AP-DLC). These treatments are eco-friendly and low-cost. The Stainless steel substrates treated by FPB showed better sliding properties than the mirror substrate. By FPB treatment, AP-DLC coating was successfully applied to steel substrates …

Densitometry, Robert Y. Chung

Articles

This chapter covers how a densitometer works. It also covers density-de-rived values and densitometry applications, including pressrun analysis. After reading this chapter, one should know that a densitometer measures light absorption due to the presence of colorants, such as ink and toner. Being sensitive to differences in dark shades, a densitometer is good at measuring colorant amounts, which makes it an ideal tool for printing-process control.

From "Printing-Process Control and Standardization"

Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations And Multi-Game Approaches, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

This chapter explores what the authors discovered about analog games and game design during the many iterative processes that have led to the Lost & Found series, and how they found certain constraints and affordances (that which an artifact assists, promotes or allows) provided by the boardgame genre. Some findings were counter-intuitive. What choices would allow for the modeling of complex systems, such as legal and economic systems? What choices would allow for gameplay within the time of a class-period? What mechanics could promote discussions of tradeoff decisions? If players are expending too much cognition on arithmetic strategizing, could that …

An Alternative Method For Surface Energy Estimation Of Substrates, Bilge Nazli Altay, Paul D. Fleming, Alexandra Pekarovicova, Bruce Myers, Cem Aydemir, Arif Karademir

Presentations and other scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Online Interactive Video Vignette That Helps Students Learn Key Concepts Of Fermentation And Respiration, Jean A. Cardinale, Dina L. Newman, L. Kate Wright

Articles

Topics related to energy transformation and metabolism are important parts of an undergraduate biology curriculum, but these are also topics that students traditionally struggle with. To address this, we have created a short online Interactive Video Vignette (IVV) called To Ferment or Not to Ferment: That is the Question. This IVV is designed to help students learn important ideas related to cellular respiration and metabolism. Students in various courses across four institutions were assigned the IVV as an out-of-class preinstruction homework assignment. To test the effectiveness of this IVV on student learning, we collected and analyzed data from questions embedded …

The Economic Impacts Of Nuclear Power Plant Closures On Rural Communities, Christina Maher

Theses

The 2015 announcement to close Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC) in Buchanan, NY caused a shockwave of concerns for the local community. As a rural community, Buchanan, NY relies on major employers to provide long-lasting careers with steady incomes and steady tax revenue for the community (Mitchell, 2019). A major employer is a business that produces more goods and services than can be utilized by the local economy, and therefore it exports a significant portion of its goods and employs five hundred workers or more (Montrose EDC, 2019). The type of industries that are major employers includes manufacturing, energy plants, …

Path Loss Model For 2.4ghz Indoor Wireless Networks With Application To Drones, Rahul Gulia

Theses

Indoor wireless communication using Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is becoming a major need for the success of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud robotics in both developed and developing countries. With different operating conditions, interference, obstacles and type of building materials used, it is difficult to predict the path loss components in an indoor environment, which are crucial for the network design. It has been observed that the proposed indoor path loss models cannot be used for UAV operations due to variations in building materials utilized, floor plans, scattering on both ends, etc. In this work, we …

Student Observations Of Postsecondary Classroom Instruction: Accessibility Challenges And Collaborative Feedback., Yasmine R. Jassal, Stephanie W. Cawthon, Sara Schley

Articles

For deaf students, accessible classroom design is often provided through external services such as interpreters or speech-to-text providers. An approach based in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), though, seeks to engage students in learning by creating classroom spaces with accessibility integrated into the pedagogical approach. Realizing these goals requires participation from one of the most valuable, yet underused, resources: the students themselves. To that end, this paper examines a student-faculty collaborative approach to increasing accessibility for deaf students in postsecondary classrooms. Results of this study suggest that student observers are able to provide concrete and constructive feedback on strategies to …

“Take Those Old Records Off The Shelf” A Uses & Gratifications Study Of Different Music Platforms, Emily Hawk

Theses

The platforms people use to listen to music have evolved rapidly in the last fifty years. Digital streaming and digital downloads are the most popular platforms to consume music, but physical platforms like CDs and vinyl are still common or, in the case of vinyl, even growing in use. This study investigated the needs being met and the reasons behind listening to music on these different platforms. This study also compared the differences in gratifications sought between physical music platforms and non-physical music platforms. A survey shared via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, as well as via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk …

Impact Of Celebrity Endorsement In Advertising Of High-Risk Products, Victoria Olaosebikan

Theses

Celebrity endorsement is one of the most popular and effective strategies in advertising. Celebrities are perceived as attractive and having both likable qualities and influential power. Marketers have become more aware of the influence celebrities have on individuals and have harnessed this into advertising products and services. Empirical studies have shown that celebrities have been very effective in advertising low-risk products and services. But how effective is this strategy in advertising high-risk products and services? This study employed the elaboration likelihood model to investigate the impact of a celebrity endorser compared to a non-celebrity endorser on consumer behavior in advertising …

Design For Communication, Weiying Chen

Theses

Increasingly numbers of younger generation have settled down their new homes away from parents after years of endeavor in bigger cities in China. They leave their parents for their works and take care of their own families. Elderly care becomes a crucial problem since filial piety is a tradition and a need in Chinese culture. Because of the implementation of “One child policy” in China in such a long time, elder parents only have one child in each family, which weights much more pressure of taking care of elder parents on the “only child”. Lack of smart phones use of …

Future Bound: Your Future, Your Way, Marisa Nowodworski

Theses

In modern American culture, a lack of emphasis has developed in regards to education and its value and role for the future. This has plagued the nation with despair, which has increased over the last several years. A growing interest in STEAM education and the available paths following secondary education, we can revitalize the nation and redirect our future to a more lucrative outcome: vocations, entrepreneurship, or post-secondary education based upon the correct path for each individual life.

The application of STEAM in education can create opportunities and expand knowledge in fields across the board: exposure to arts can create …

Murine Flexor Tendon Repair Model With Noninvasive Assessment Of Healing With Ultrasound, Fei Rost

Theses

Flexor tendon injuries in the hands are relatively common, significantly disabling more than 100,000 people in the United States per year (Nichols 2019). The majority of flexor tendon injuries require surgical repair, but despite the advancement of technology and medicine, current treatments still yield poor outcomes. Even with prevailing treatments to improve or restore function to the affected digit(s), patients often suffer psychologically and financially in the long-term. A recent study gave a conservative estimate that flexor tendon lacerations cost the American healthcare system and taxpayers between US $240.8-409.1 million per year and emphasized the need to “focus our efforts …

Exploration Of The Motion Graphics Educational Tools Based On The Animations ‘Virtual Property’, Hao Ge

Theses

Every user must agree with a cookie policy if they want to continue viewing a new web page. In most cases, users scan the terms and click the button. However, they often know nothing about what a web cookie is, what advantages a web cookie brings, and what a web cookie’s disadvantages are. Every coin has two sides. Web cookies save users time and enhance their experience, but they may put users on a dangerous path. A new cookie is created and stored on the computer every time users visit a new page. These cookies bring users benefits but also …

A Ux Design Project For A Transparent News Platform, Keni Wu

Theses

In recent years, fake news has been dominating real news on the Internet. It misleads the public, stirs up and intensifies social conflicts. Online news readers crave the truth than ever. However, it is difficult for them to identify fake news from massive information on the Internet. This paper seeks to help online news readers make more informed and confident judgments on fact-checking by building a transparent news platform. This platform collaborates with news publishers to provide evidence and publish news articles on the desktop software. It also includes a news website which creates an engaging and understandable experience for …

The Sense Of Anxiety, Suhyeon Kang

Theses

My thesis research explores the use of glass, and several other mediums to reflect impressions of traumatic memories without directly representing the details of a personal story. Sensory experiences act as metaphors for memories. In my work, glass serves as a medium for preservation of those impressions. The frustrating and fragile characteristics of glass parallel my annoyance with my anxiety. I discovered, however, that working with glass has a therapeutic effect for me. I researched the psychology of traumatic memory and the work of artists whose work is related to my inquiries. This process allowed me to use visual language …

Unpackaging Aseptic Presentation: A Qualitative Study Into The Contextual Influences Involving Medical Packaging Design And Use Heuristics Among Perioperative Personnel, Tony Trier, Yuanchenxi Zhang, Laura Bix

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

Newly emerging mandates in the Medical Device Regulation in Europe and additions to ISO 11607 require medical device manufacturers characterize how package designs facilitate (or hinder) aseptic transfer by perioperative personnel.

The present work utilized a semi-structured interview with clinicians on the topic of aseptic presentation. Methodological decisions related to the interviews and assessment of results were undergirded with affordance and situated learning theories to identify the components of a user experience. QDA Miner software was used post-hoc to code, quantify, and categorize the data into major and minor themes.

The study identifies several components within the user’s experience that …

Cross Cultural Study On Creativity: How Do Croatian Working Professionals And Emirati Working Professionals Conceptualize Creativity?, Alice Almer

Theses

Living in very dynamic and uncertain times, we can witness the power and the necessity of utilizing creativity and innovation as they can provide solutions to complex problems. However, how we see and define creativity is influenced by many factors, and culture is one of them. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of culture on creativity conceptualization. Specifically, the objective was to find out whether the working professionals of Croatia and the working professionals of the United Arab Emirates view creativity differently. In order to investigate this, a cross-sectional study involving 109 participants from Croatia and …

Using Information Communications Technologies To Implement Universal Design For Learning, David Banes, Anne Hayes, Christopher Kurz, Raja Kashalnagar

Articles

The purpose of this paper is to assist Ministries of Education, their donors and partners, Disabled Persons Organizations (DPOs), and the practitioner community funded by and working with USAID to select, pilot, and (as appropriate) scale up ICT4E solutions to facilitate the implementation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), with a particular emphasis on supporting students with disabilities to acquire literacy and numeracy skills. The paper focuses primarily on how technology can support foundational skills acquisition for students with disabilities, while also explaining when, why, and how technologies that assist students with disabilities can, in some applications, have positive impacts …

Using Classification For Analysis Of Multi-Modal Video Summarization, Brendan Wells

Theses

Video Summarization refers to taking the important contents of a video and condensing it down to an easily consumable piece of data without having to watch the entire video. Currently, Millions of Videos are being recorded and shared every day. These videos range from the consumer level, such as a birthday party or wedding video, all the way up to industry such as film and television. We have constructed a model that seeks to address the problem of not being able to consume all the media that is being presented to you because of time constraints. To do this, we …

Astralis: Discover 1000 Years Of You, Emma Canfield

Theses

Problem

We are defined by our memories and experiences. Despite the proliferation of family photos and video media, we lack an engaging way to connect our memories and experiences to those images. Online genealogical programs (such as Ancestry, MyHeritage, or FamilySearch) remain two-dimensional and inherently confusing to navigate. As soon as the user chooses to dive more deeply into one relative’s additional family, they leave the view they were in and cannot easily navigate back, or even see themselves in context any longer. Similarly, image archiving programs (such as Apple Photos, Shutterfly) or AmazonPhotos) are simplistic and rely on a …

Machine-Assisted Translation By Human-In-The-Loop Crowdsourcing For Bambara, Allahsera Auguste Tapo

Theses

Language is more than a tool of conveying information; it is utilized in all aspects of our lives. Yet only a small number of languages in the 7,000 languages worldwide are highly resourced by human language technologies (HLT). Despite African languages representing over 2,000 languages, only a few African languages are highly resourced, for which there exists a considerable amount of parallel digital data.

We present a novel approach to machine translation (MT) for under-resourced languages by improving the quality of the model using a paradigm called ``humans in the Loop.''

This thesis describes the work carried out to create …

Parametric Study Of Infrared Imaging Based Breast Cancer Detection Program, Carlos B. Gutierrez

Theses

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers among women and is responsible for over 41,000 lives every year in the US according to The American Cancer Society. Current screening and imaging methods such as mammography, breast magnetic resonance imaging, and breast ultrasound imaging have helped in improving survival rate when the cancer is detected at an early stage. The problems with these techniques include: low sensitivity, patient discomfort, invasiveness, and cost. Due to current advancements in infrared and computational technologies, infrared thermography has been utilized as a noninvasive adjunctive screening modality. A computerized approach using infrared imaging (IRI) …

Music Note Learning Card Game Design, Ying You

Theses

Within the past several decades, Chinese people's living conditions are getting better because of the quick development in the Chinese economy. People are now paying more and more attention to children's artistic accomplishments in China. Therefore, more and more parents choose to let their children start learning musical instruments when they are young. However, the first step to learn an instrument is learning how to read and understand different note values and basic rhythm patterns. For example, in China, the traditional way of teaching basic rhythmic patterns is that the teacher demonstrates the basic rhythm pattern to a group of …

Implementing And Testing Vlans In Meshed Tree Protocol, Ankush Kaul

Theses

Meshed Tree Protocol (MTP)[1][2] is being developed to overcome the performance challenges faced with older loop avoidance layer 2 protocols like Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)[3] and Rapid STP (RSTP)[5] which have high convergence time, causing a significant delay during initial convergence and subsequent re-convergence in the event of topology change or link failure. This slow convergence is not suitable for the modern high speed and dynamic networks and is being addressed with better performing protocols like MTP which uses Meshed Tree Algorithm (MTA) to form multiple overlapping trees[1]. In this thesis we will implement Virtual Local Area Network(VLAN)[4] for MTP …

Blockchain And Smart Contracts: The Need For Better Education, Ali Alkhajeh

Theses

The study aims at understanding the current scenario of blockchain education and whether it is meeting the increasing demand of blockchain professionals in the job market. In addition, it also provided a comparison between Ethereum and Hyperledger and analyzed the one best suited for better academic curriculum design. By drawing from various sources of data, including journals, articles, reports, the study provided critical insights into the various aspects of a blockchain education. It assesses the existing curriculum on the blockchain that includes courses and programs from various renowned universities and business schools. The study reveals that although the courses are …

Children In 2077: Designing Children’S Technologies In The Age Of Transhumanism, Oğuz Oz Buruk, Oğuzhan Özcan, Gökçe Elif Baykal, Tilbe Göksun, Selçuk Acar, Güler Akduman, Mehmet Aydın Baytaş, Ceylan Beşevli, Joe Best, Aykut Coşkun, Hüseyin Uğur Genç, Baki Kocaballi, Samuli Laato, Cássia Mota, Konstantinos Papangelis, Marigo Raftopoulos, Richard Ramchurn, Juan Sádaba, Mattia Thibault, Annika Wolff, Mert Yıldız

Presentations and other scholarship

What for and how will we design children’s technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children’s lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies can clearly be defined as transhumanist, such as under-skin chips or …

Tactviz: A Vmd Plugin For Tactile Visualization Of Protein Structures, Olivia R. Shaw, Jodi A. Hadden-Perilla

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

Scientific disciplines spanning biology, biochemistry, and biophysics involve the study of proteins and their functions. Visualization of protein structures represents a barrier to education and research in these disciplines for students who are blind or visually impaired. Here, we present a software plugin for readily producing variable-height tactile graphics of proteins using the free biomolecular visualization software Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) and protein structure data that is publicly available through the Protein Data Bank. Our method also supports interactive tactile visualization of proteins with VMD on electronic refreshable tactile display devices. Employing our method in an academic laboratory has enabled …

Astrodance: Engaging Deaf And Hard-Of-Hearing Students In Astrophysics Via Multimedia Performances, Jason Nordhaus, Manuela Campanelli, Joe Bochner, Thomas Warfield, Hans-Peter Bischof, Jake Noel-Storr

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

The dynamics of gravitating astrophysical systems such as black holes and neutron stars are fascinatingly complex, offer some of nature's most spectacular phenomena, and capture the public's imagination in ways that few subjects can. Here, we describe AstroDance, a multi-media project to engage deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students in astronomy and gravitational physics. AstroDance incorporates multiple means of representation of scientific concepts and was performed primarily for secondary and post-secondary audiences at ~20 venues in the northeastern US prior to the historic first detection of gravitational waves. As part of the AstroDance project, we surveyed ~1000 audience members roughly split …