Digital Commons Network^™

Mathematical Modeling Of Clostridium Thermocellum’S Metabolic Responses To Environmental Perturbation, Bless Adotey

Theses and Dissertations--Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

Clostridium thermocellum is a thermophilic anaerobe that is capable of producing ethanol directly from lignocellulosic compounds, however this organism suffers from low ethanol tolerance and low ethanol yields. In vivo mathematical modeling studies based on steady state traditional metabolic flux analysis, metabolic control analysis, transient and steady states’ flux spectrum analysis (FSA) were conducted on C. thermocellum’s central metabolism. The models were developed in Matrix Laboratory software ( MATLAB^® (The Language of Technical Computing), R2008b, Version 7.7.0.471)) based on known stoichiometry from C. thermocellum pathway and known physical constraints. Growth on cellobiose from Metabolic flux analysis (MFA) and Metabolic …

Parametric Estimation In Competing Risks And Multi-State Models, Yushun Lin

Theses and Dissertations--Statistics

The typical research of Alzheimer's disease includes a series of cognitive states. Multi-state models are often used to describe the history of disease evolvement. Competing risks models are a sub-category of multi-state models with one starting state and several absorbing states.

Analyses for competing risks data in medical papers frequently assume independent risks and evaluate covariate effects on these events by modeling distinct proportional hazards regression models for each event. Jeong and Fine (2007) proposed a parametric proportional sub-distribution hazard (SH) model for cumulative incidence functions (CIF) without assumptions about the dependence among the risks. We modified their model to …

Stochastic Dynamics Of Gene Transcription, Yan Xie

Theses and Dissertations--Statistics

Gene transcription in individual living cells is inevitably a stochastic and dynamic process. Little is known about how cells and organisms learn to balance the fidelity of transcriptional control and the stochasticity of transcription dynamics. In an effort to elucidate the contribution of environmental signals to this intricate balance, a Three State Model was recently proposed, and the transcription system was assumed to transit among three different functional states randomly.

In this work, we employ this model to demonstrate how the stochastic dynamics of gene transcription can be characterized by the three transition parameters. We compute the probability distribution of …

Mechanism And Kinetics Of Covalent Amide-Linked Adduct Formation In Solution And Solid Peptide Formulations, Michael Paul Dehart

Theses and Dissertations--Pharmacy

Peptides and proteins are prone to chemical and physical degradation in solutions and solids. One of the most common chemical degradation pathways involves deamidation of asparagine residues through a reactive succinimide intermediate resulting in the formation of aspartyl and isoaspartyl degradation products.

In this work, kinetic studies in aqueous solutions demonstrated that the succinimide intermediate is susceptible to attack by nucleophiles other than water. This may lead to a variety of alternative degradants. In solutions containing high concentrations of ammonia, the succinimide generated in the deamidation of the model peptides Phe-Asn-Gly and Phe-isoAsn-Gly underwent back-reaction with ammonia leading to peptide …

Examining Kentucky Public Schools: Gender Differences In An Index Measure Of Accountability For Academic Standards, Khin Thazin Myint

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

The Kentucky public education system has made progress over the past 20 years after a number of reforms beginning in 1990. A stated goal of these reforms has been not only to improve the overall performance of students in a school, but to also ensure that no student groups be allowed to fall behind. To accomplish this, the state has adopted and implemented goals that are shared with those of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, including school accountability and a goal of proficiency for all students by the year 2014. However the most recent analysis of three statewide …

Competition Among Public Schools: An Analysis Of Kentucky Public Elementary Schools, Sarah L. Burns

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

This study relied on data gathered on school identifiers and characteristics, student and teacher characteristics, and index scores of Kentucky public elementary schools, collected from 2001-2008 at the school level. An extensive literature review was completed in order to examine the effects of competition on public schools, both positive and negative.

This paper focused on the impact of public school competition on academic index scores in Kentucky school districts. Competition was measured in two ways: by the number of schools available per student in the district as well as the total district enrollment controlling for the total number of schools …

Public School Performance: Examining The Relationship Between Teacher Training Program And School Achievement, Lindsay Griffith

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Few would argue the importance of providing today‟s youth with a solid educational foundation, yet the United States ranks as low as 25th educationally among 34 OECD developed nations1 . Many researchers have studied the various factors affecting student performance in the K-12 educational system, but mixed, ambiguous, or conflicting results have led to a general sense of uncertainty regarding who to hold accountable. The research has tended to focus on teacher effectiveness or school funding. While those are among a wealth of valid inputs to examine, this study attempted to determine the viability of examining the effect of teacher …

Educational Advancement: Decision Influences Regarding Attendance And Level Of Post-Secondary Education, William Spears

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

The intent of this study was to determine which characteristics from a group of student, teacher, and school characteristics had a significant influence in affecting enrollment in education beyond high school. There are social benefits from having a more educated populace, the Kentucky political system has highlighted intentions to increase enrollment in institutions, and Kentucky has lagged behind the nation and most states in its ability to continue educating the populace beyond high school. Most of the previous efforts to examine postsecondary attendance decisions have focused on the demographics of students with the implication that those student characteristics are the …

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder In Childhood Is Associated With Cognitive Test Profiles In The Geriatric Population But Not With Mild Cognitive Impairment Or Alzheimer's Disease, N. Ivanchak, Erin L. Abner, S. A. Carr, S. J. Freeman, A. Seybert, John Ranseen, Gregory A. Jicha

Sanders-Brown Center on Aging Faculty Publications

The frequency of ADHD in the aging population and its relationship to late-life cognitive decline has not been studied previously. To address this gap in our understanding, the Wender-Utah ADHD Rating scale (WURS) was administered to 310 geriatric subjects with cognitive status ranging from normal cognition to mild cognitive impairment to overt dementia. The frequency of WURS-positive ADHD in this sample was 4.4%. WURS scores were not related to cognitive diagnoses, but did show nonlinear associations with tasks requiring sustained attention. The frequency of ADHD appears stable across generations and does not appear to be associated with MCI or dementia …

A Secure Online Payment System, Shristi Pant

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

An online payment system allows a customer to make a payment to an online merchant or a service provider. Payment gateways, a channel between customers and payment processors, use various security tools to secure a customer’s payment information, usually debit or credit card information, during an online payment. However, the security provided by a payment gateway cannot completely protect a customer’s payment information when a merchant also has the ability to obtain the payment information in some form. Furthermore, not all merchants provide a secure payment environment to their customers and, despite having a standard payment policy, adhere to it. …

Checkpointing And Recovery In Distributed And Database Systems, Jiang Wu

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

A transaction-consistent global checkpoint of a database records a state of the database which reflects the effect of only completed transactions and not the re- sults of any partially executed transactions. This thesis establishes the necessary and sufficient conditions for a checkpoint of a data item (or the checkpoints of a set of data items) to be part of a transaction-consistent global checkpoint of the database. This result would be useful for constructing transaction-consistent global checkpoints incrementally from the checkpoints of each individual data item of a database. By applying this condition, we can start from any useful checkpoint of …

Sensing Characteristics Of Multiwalled Carbon Nanotube (Mwcnt) Sensors Embedded In Porous Alumina Membranes, Swetha Sree Nimmagadda

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

A theoretical model is developed for calculating the sensitivity of resistive sensors based on aligned multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) embedded in the pores of alumina membranes. Aligned MWCNTs offer more surface area as each CNT acts as a landing site for detecting gas species. The MWCNTs behave as a p-type semiconducting layer; when the bus bar contacts are placed at either end of the top surface the resistance between the contacts responds to oxidizing (resistance decreases) and reducing gases (resistance increases). The model presented in this thesis aims to understand the device resistance dependence upon the MWCNT resistance, and the …

Camera Planning And Fusion In A Heterogeneous Camera Network, Jian Zhao

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Wide-area camera networks are becoming more and more common. They have widerange of commercial and military applications from video surveillance to smart home and from traffic monitoring to anti-terrorism. The design of such a camera network is a challenging problem due to the complexity of the environment, self and mutual occlusion of moving objects, diverse sensor properties and a myriad of performance metrics for different applications. In this dissertation, we consider two such challenges: camera planing and camera fusion. Camera planning is to determine the optimal number and placement of cameras for a target cost function. Camera fusion describes the …

Control Characteristics Of An All-Digital Proportional-Integral-Derivative (Pid) Compensator, David Michael Feinauer

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

The digitization of classical control systems presents a number of challenges and opportunities with respect to the miniaturization, distribution, reliability verification and obsolescence of both the controller and the underlying system under control. A method for the design of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) compensators realized in the form of all-digital components is presented. All-digital refers to a system implementation that is realizable with a wide range of digital logic components including discrete digital logic elements and programmable logic devices (PLDs) such as field-programmable gate arrays. The proportional, integral and derivative components of the classical PID control law were re-envisioned in terms of …

Evaluation Of Intelligibility And Speaker Similarity Of Voice Transformation, Anusha Raghunathan

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Voice transformation refers to a class of techniques that modify the voice characteristics either to conceal the identity or to mimic the voice characteristics of another speaker. Its applications include automatic dialogue replacement and voice generation for people with voice disorders. The diversity in applications makes evaluation of voice transformation a challenging task. The objective of this research is to propose a framework to evaluate intentional voice transformation techniques. Our proposed framework is based on two fundamental qualities: intelligibility and speaker similarity. Intelligibility refers to the clarity of the speech content after voice transformation and speaker similarity measures how well …

Applying The Rasch Model To Measure And Compare First- Generation And Continuing-Generation College Students’ Academic Self-Efficacy, Nichole Marie Knutson

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

Students who are the first in their families to attend college are less likely to earn a college degree as compared to their continuing-generation peers. In efforts to increase college graduation rates for first-generation college students, support programs designed to assist first-generation college students are increasing in numbers. These first- generation programs are relying on existing research to build effective curriculums. Even though an extensive body of literature exists in the fields of self-efficacy and first- generation college students, research investigating the self-efficacy of first-generation college students are extremely limited. The research is further limited when examining academic self-efficacy and …

Six Japanese Gardens And Trois Rivières: Delta: An Analysis Of Kaija Saariaho’S Two Major Works For Solo Percussion And Electronics, Bradley Edward Meyer

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Music for solo multiple-percussion (“multi-percussion”) has been rapidly developing in terms of quantity of and creativity exhibited within works since this genre was established in the late 1950s. It is important to underscore, analyze, and question the music of composers who have helped further multi-percussion towards the highest level of musical excellence possible as the genre continues to expand and mature. Finnish-born composer Kaija Saairaho has achieved international fame and success with her acoustic, electronic, and electro-acoustic (the simultaneous combination of electronic and acoustic elements) compositions. She has a large body of musical works, including two compositions for solo percussionist …

Global Change Reactive Background Subtraction, Edwin Premkumar Sathiyamoorthy

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Background subtraction is the technique of segmenting moving foreground objects from stationary or dynamic background scenes. Background subtraction is a critical step in many computer vision applications including video surveillance, tracking, gesture recognition etc. This thesis addresses the challenges associated with the background subtraction systems due to the sudden illumination changes happening in an indoor environment. Most of the existing techniques adapt to gradual illumination changes, but fail to cope with the sudden illumination changes. Here, we introduce a Global change reactive background subtraction to model these changes as a regression function of spatial image coordinates. The regression model is …

The Role Of Co-Infection In The Spread Of Hiv In Sub-Saharan Africa, Diego Fernando Cuadros

Theses and Dissertations--Biology

The cause of the high HIV prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa is incompletely understood, with heterosexual penile-vaginal transmission proposed as the main mechanism. Heterosexual HIV transmission has a very low probability; further, a single estimation of heterosexual probability of HIV transmission fails to reproduce the variation associated with important biological cofactors. In particular, studies of HIV incidence suggest that co-infection with other infectious diseases influence the HIV transmission, and therefore might substantially vary the pattern of the spread of the infection. To assess the effect of co-infection on the spread of HIV, I developed and analyzed several mathematical and statistical models …

Assessing The Perceptions Of Environmental Pollutants, Health And Nutrition Behavior To Improve Risk Communications In Kentucky, Elizabeth Virginia Willett

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Nutrition interventions are an effective way to improve the dietary habits and lifestyle choices and reduce the risk of chronic disease. The Researchers in the UK-SRP Community Engagement Core develop nutrition programs for communities affected by environmental pollutants. Risk communication is a discipline that can be used to develop targeted nutrition interventions that will yield positive behavior change. The purpose of this study was to examine knowledge, risk perception, and actions concerning environmental pollutants and nutrition behavior. Data was collected using a modified survey instrument based on the validated Environmental Health Engagement Profile (EHEP). Survey participants from diverse regions of …

Gaze Estimation Using Sclera And Iris Extraction, Prashanth Rao Periketi

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Tracking gaze of an individual provides important information in understanding the behavior of that person. Gaze tracking has been widely used in a variety of applications from tracking consumers gaze fixation on advertisements, controlling human-computer devices, to understanding behaviors of patients with various types of visual and/or neurological disorders such as autism. Gaze pattern can be identified using different methods but most of them require the use of specialized equipments which can be prohibitively expensive for some applications. In this dissertation, we investigate the possibility of using sclera and iris regions captured in a webcam sequence to estimate gaze pattern. …

Microsurgical Reconstruction Of Large, Locally Advanced Cutaneous Malignancy Of The Head And Neck, Joseph L. Hill, Brian Rinker

Surgery Faculty Publications

Large, locally advanced cutaneous malignancy of the head and neck region is rare. However, when present, they impart a significant reconstructive challenge. These cancers have a tendency to invade peripheral tissues covering a large surface area as well as expose deeper structures such as skull, dura, orbit, and sinus after resection. Complicating the reconstructive dilemma is the high incidence of individuals who have undergone previous surgery in the region as well as adjuvant radiation therapy, which may preclude the use of local flaps or skin graft. Free tissue transfer provides a reconstructive surgeon the ability to provide well-vascularized tissue with …

Cell And Protein-Based Sensing Systems For The Detection Of Environmentally And Physiologically Relevant Molecules, Kendrick Bruce Turner

Theses and Dissertations--Chemistry

The detection of small molecules in complex sample matrices such as environmental (surface and ground water, sediment, etc.) and biological (blood, serum, plasma, etc.) samples is of paramount importance for monitoring the distribution of environmental pollutants and their patterns of exposure within the population as well as diagnosing and managing diseases. Biosensors have demonstrated a singular ability to sensitively and selectively detect analytes in complex samples without the need for extensive sample preparation and pretreatment. Nature has demonstrated myriad examples of exquisite selectivity in spite of complexity and we seek to take advantage of that attribute in the development of …

Opioid Codrugs For Pain Management, Ujjwal Chakraborty

Theses and Dissertations--Chemistry

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissus damage or described in terms of such damage. Opioids are effective in treating moderate to severe pain, but opioid alone therapy is associated with several adverse effects, development of tolerance and addiction potential. One way to solve these problems is to administer opioids with adjuvant drugs. In this project several opioid molecules were combined with other adjuvant drugs in a single chemical entity to form a codrug.

A series of codrugs were prepared by conjugation of an opioid with S-(-)-nornicotine, ketamine, norketamine and gabapentin. Several …

Overcoming The "Impossible Issue" Of Nonobviousness In Design Patents, Janice M. Mueller, Daniel Harris Brean

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

On Simple But Hard Random Instances Of Propositional Theories And Logic Programs, Gayathri Namasivayam

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

In the last decade, Answer Set Programming (ASP) and Satisfiability (SAT) have been used to solve combinatorial search problems and practical applications in which they arise. In each of these formalisms, a tool called a solver is used to solve problems. A solver takes as input a specification of the problem – a logic program in the case of ASP, and a CNF theory for SAT – and produces as output a solution to the problem. Designing fast solvers is important for the success of this general-purpose approach to solving search problems. Classes of instances that pose challenges to solvers …

A Multi-Stage Decision Support Model For Coordinated Sustainable Product And Supply Chain Design, Haritha Metta

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

In this research, a decision support model for coordinating sustainable product and supply chain design decisions is developed using a multi-stage hierarchical approach. The model evaluates alternate product designs and their corresponding supply chain configurations to identify the best product design and the corresponding supply chain configuration that maximizes the economic, environmental and societal benefits. The model considers a total life-cycle approach and incorporates closed-loop flow among multiple product lifecycles. In the first stage, a mixed integer linear programming model is developed to select for each product design an optimal supply chain configuration that maximizes the profit. In the subsequent …

Convergence Of Eigenvalues For Elliptic Systems On Domains With Thin Tubes And The Green Function For The Mixed Problem, Justin L. Taylor

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

I consider Dirichlet eigenvalues for an elliptic system in a region that consists of two domains joined by a thin tube. Under quite general conditions, I am able to give a rate on the convergence of the eigenvalues as the tube shrinks away. I make no assumption on the smoothness of the coefficients and only mild assumptions on the boundary of the domain.

Also, I consider the Green function associated with the mixed problem on a Lipschitz domain with a general decomposition of the boundary. I show that the Green function is Hölder continuous, which shows how a solution to …

Teacher Efficacy, Job Satisfaction, And Alternative Certification In Early Career Special Education Teachers, Brenda C. Voris

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

The number of special education students continues to rise, creating the need for additional special education teachers. Alternative certification programs have dealt with the special education teacher shortage, but not the question of teacher quality. Most teachers entering classrooms from alternative certification programs have little or no formal education in methodology or behavior management, but have commensurate responsibilities as their more experienced colleagues.

The intent of this quantitative study was to examine 222 special education teachers’ sense of self-efficacy and job satisfaction in 21 central Kentucky school districts. The focus was the relation among special education teacher’s degree of efficacy …

Topological And Combinatorial Properties Of Neighborhood And Chessboard Complexes, Matthew Zeckner

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the topological properties of simplicial complexes that arise from two distinct combinatorial objects. In 2003, A. Björner and M. de Longueville proved that the neighborhood complex of the stable Kneser graph SG_n,k is homotopy equivalent to a k-sphere. Further, for n = 2 they showed that the neighborhood complex deformation retracts to a subcomplex isomorphic to the associahedron. They went on to ask whether or not, for all n and k, the neighborhood complex of SG_n,k contains as a deformation retract the boundary complex of a simplicial polytope. Part one of this dissertation …