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Reflected Image Processing For Specular Weld Pool Surface Measurement, Aparna Janga

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

The surface of the weld pool contains information that can be exploited to emulate a skilled human welder to better understand and control the welding process. Of the existing techniques, the method that uses the pool's specular nature to an advantage and which is relatively more cost effective, and suitable for welding environment is the one that utilizes reflected images to reconstruct 3D weld pool surface by using structured light and image processing techniques. In this thesis, an improvement has been made to the existing method by changing welding direction to obtain a denser reflected dot-matrix pattern allowing more accurate …

A Novel Endonuclease Activity Associated With The Arabidopsis Ortholog Of The 30-Kda Subunit Of Cleavage And Polyadenylation Specificity Factor, Balasubrahmanyam Addepalli, Arthur G. Hunt

Plant and Soil Sciences Faculty Publications

The polyadenylation of messenger RNAs is mediated by a multi-subunit complex that is conserved in eukaryotes. Among the most interesting of these proteins is the 30-kDa-subunit of the Cleavage and Polyadenylation Specificity Factor, or CPSF30. In this study, the Arabidopsis CPSF30 ortholog, AtCPSF30, is characterized. This protein possesses an unexpected endonucleolytic activity that is apparent as an ability to nick and degrade linear as well as circular single-stranded RNA. Endonucleolytic action by AtCPSF30 leaves RNA 3′ ends with hydroxyl groups, as they can be labeled by RNA ligase with [³²P]-cytidine-3′,5′-bisphosphate. Mutations in the first of the three CCCH …

Civil Rights For Whom?: Gay Rights Versus Religious Freedom, George W. Dent Jr.

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Deus Ex Machina And The Unfulfilled Promise Of New York Times V. Sullivan: Applying The Times For All Seasons, Joseph H. King Jr.

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Corporate Deferred Prosecutions Through The Looking Glass Of Contract Policing, Candace Zierdt, Ellen S. Podgor

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Case For Kentucky Sex Offenders: Residency Restrictions And Their Constitutional Validity, Alicia A. Sterrett

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Friend Or Fiend? A "Fair Use" Analysis Of Audioblogs, Carson Blythe Morris

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Economic Analysis Of Cellulase Production Methods For Bio-Ethanol, Jun Zhuang, Mary A. Marchant, Sue E. Nokes, Herbert J. Strobel

Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Faculty Publications

The cost of cellulase enzymes has limited the feasibility of producing ethanol from fibrous biomass. Traditional submerged fermentation (SmF) was compared to an alternative method of producing cellulase, solid state cultivation (SSC). Results from an economic analysis indicated that the unit costs for cellulase enzyme production were $15.67 (The prices are all 2004 prices in this article, except otherwise stated. We deflated newer prices to 2004 prices using a deflation factor 0.9 per year and inflated older prices to 2004 prices using an inflation factor 1.1.) per kilogram ($/kg) and $40.36/kg, for the SSC and SmF methods, respectively, while the …

The Offshore Asset Protection Trust: A Prudent Financial Planning Device Or The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel?, Richard C. Ausness

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In recent years, a large number of Americans have established "asset protection trusts" in foreign countries. An asset protection trust is a self-settled spendthrift trust which is created in order to protect the settlor's property from the claims of creditors. Virtually all American jurisdictions recognize spendthrift trusts, which prohibit both voluntary and involuntary alienation of a third party beneficiary's interest in a trust; however, most do not allow a settlor who has retained a beneficial interest in a spendthrift trust to protect that interest from the claims of creditors. A growing number of present and former British possessions, however, have …

Balancing Lives: Individual Accountability And The Death Penalty As Punishment For Genocide (Lessons From Rwanda), Melynda J. Price

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this Article is not to answer the question of whether the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for genocide. One could safely argue that there is an emerging norm in international law against the death penalty, but individual countries have maintained their right to use the death penalty and continue to do so in code and in practice. This Article, using Rwanda as a case study, evaluates the real outcomes of such discrepancies in punishment at the domestic and international level, and the ability of both approaches to bring justice to the victims of genocide. Both domestic …

Pharma On The Hot Seat, Nicole Huberfeld

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The pharmaceutical industry has been receiving greater scrutiny lately due in large part to the many public and private legal enforcement actions taken against pharmaceutical manufacturers. These enforcement actions, along with legal developments such as the OIG Compliance Guidance for Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s statutory guidelines for public corporations, the HIPAA privacy regulations, and the Medicare Modernization Act, have the potential to encourage the pharmaceutical industry to self-regulate beyond the bounds currently required by the law. After a brief overview of enforcement actions and compliance programs directed toward the pharmaceutical industry, this Article reviews a similar situation the hospital …

Delimiting The Culture Defense, James M. Donovan, John Stuart Garth

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This essay builds upon the arguments of Alison Dundes Renteln in her influential book, The Cultural Defense (2004), in which she argues persuasively for a uniformly recognized culture defense in certain litigations. Critiquing some of her details, we recast her three-prong culture defense test to more effectively balance the competing interests of minority culture members to have their ways of life taken seriously by the courts, and of members of the dominant tradition who wish to preserve the rule of law with its necessary perception as treating all parties equally. The offered formulation now includes the following five elements:

1. …

Why Do Landlords Still Discriminate (And What Can Be Done About It)?, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Let's say you have a serious, though not life-threatening, medical condition, such as a non-malignant growth in your back that causes considerable pain and impairs your ability to walk. At first, your doctor tells you there is no cure, but then one day, a new drug specifically designed to eliminate this kind of problem is approved. You take this drug, but notice no change. With your doctor's encouragement, you continue to take the drug, hoping that its cumulative effect will achieve the desired result. Twenty years go by with no relief. Then, your doctor tells you that a much stronger …

Xenobiotic Transporters In Lactating Mammary Epithelial Cells: Predictions For Drug Accumulation In Breast Milk, Philip Earle Empey

Theses and Dissertations--Pharmacy

Recent literature has established that breast cancer resistance protein (ABCG2) is upregulated during lactation and is responsible for the greater than predicted accumulation of many drugs in breast milk. The objectives of this project were (1) to investigate the role of this transporter in the reported apically-directed nitrofurantoin flux in the CIT3 cell culture model of lactation, (2) to develop a mathematical model for drug transfer into breast milk to relate initial flux rates, steady-state concentrations, efflux ratios, and in vivo milk to serum ratios (M/S) and (3) to identify xenobiotic transporters that are highly expressed, and therefore potentially important …

Violent Personal Crimes On Campus: The Influence Of Size, Setting, And Police Presence, Chris Mckinney

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Statement of the Problem

Violent campus crime, in particular rape and aggravated assault, has become more pronounced in the last several decades. The judicial and legislative branches have responded through court decisions and legal enactments that require most universities to collect and report campus crime data. Many concerns have arisen as to the effectiveness and implications associated with such mandates. Some believe current laws do little to improve campus safety. Some suggested solutions to address campus crime have involved safety initiatives/programs and potential staffing increases to their campus police force.

Research Questions

• Are universities a reflection of surrounding community levels …

"Appalachian Ingenuity" In Action: Activists Reach Beyond Traditional Economic Development In Kentucky, Stephanie Ann Blessing

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

This Thesis is an exploration into social change strategies in Appalachia that are alternative to conventional economic development practices and discourses. Drawing from original interviews with social justice activists in central and eastern Kentucky, I document a diversity of subversive discourses circulating in Appalachia, and I delineate models alternative to development that are driving action in several different communities. Through what one of my interviewees described as Appalachian ingenuity,1 individuals are enacting extremely hopeful and imaginative projects, and they are conjuring unique formulations that contribute to academic theories on alternative economies, capitalocentrism, neoliberalism, postmodern economics, anti-development, post-development, and spatial strategies …

Nitroreductase: Evidence For A Fluxional Low-Temperature State And Its Possible Role In Enzyme Activity, Peng Zhang

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

The enzyme nitroreductase (NR) catalyzes two-electron reduction of high explosives such as trinitrotoluene (TNT), a wide variety of other toxic nitroaromatic compounds, as well as riboflavin derivatives, using a tightly-bound flavin mononucleotide (FMN) cofactor. It has important environmental and clinical implications. Previous studies have focused on elucidating NRs catalytic mechanism and solving its crystal structure.

In this dissertation work, we first develop and implement new strategies for labeling NR with stable isotopes, and report a completely re-designed protocol for NRs purification. Then we report the successful assignment of over half of NRs backbone resonances using 3d-NMR methods. The most significant …

Targeting Axon Growth From Neurons Transplantedinto The Central Nervous System, Kristine S. Ziemba

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Damage to the adult mammalian central nervous system (CNS), either by traumatic injury or disease, usually results in permanent sensory and/or motor deficits. Regeneration of neural circuits is limited both by the lack of growthpromoting molecules and by the presence of growth-inhibitory molecules in the mature brain and spinal cord. The research described here examines the therapeutic potential of viral vectors and neuronal transplants to reconstruct damaged neural pathways in the CNS. Experimental neural transplantation techniques often fall short of expectations because of limited transplant survival and insufficient neurite outgrowth to repair connections and induce behavioral recovery. These shortcomings are …

Implications For The Interaction Between The Heat Shock Transcription Factors And The Translocated Promoter Region Protein, Hollie Suzanne Skaggs

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

The heat-shock response is one of the many complex physiological systems that organisms have developed in order to protect their cells against stress. This response is initiated by the binding of heat shock factor 1 (HSF1) to the promoters of genes containing heat-shock elements (HSEs,) which results in the expression of several proteins, among them the proteo-protective inducible heat-shock protein (hsp70i). Due to HSF1s critical role in this process, an active area of research is trying to understand of how HSF1 executes its function. Considering the rapidity with which the field of cell biology is expanding, in particular the sub-field …

Influences Of Chromium (Iii) Picolinate On Pigs Under Thermal, Immune Or Dietary Stress, And On Adrenal Steroid Secretion, Beob Gyun Kim

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

The objectives were to investigate the effects of chromium (III) picolinate (CrPic; up to 2,000 ppb of Cr) on growing pigs subjected to a variety of stressors including thermal, immune, or dietary stress and to examine the effects of CrPic on steroidogenesis from adrenocortical cells. In the thermal stress study, high ambient temperature caused reduced weight gain and feed consumption (P andlt; 0.01), and low ambient temperature caused increased feed intake and feed:gain (P andlt; 0.01). However, these effects were not moderated by CrPic, and respiratory rate, plasma cortisol, or plasma glucose were unaffected by CrPic. In the immune stress …

A Controller Area Network Layer For Reconfigurable Embedded Systems, Nithyananda Siva Jeganathan

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Dependable and Fault-tolerant computing is actively being pursued as a research area since the 1980s in various fields involving development of safety-critical applications. The ability of the system to provide reliable functional service as per its design is a key paradigm in dependable computing. For providing reliable service in fault-tolerant systems, dynamic reconfiguration has to be supported to enable recovery from errors (induced by faults) or graceful degradation in case of service failures. Reconfigurable Distributed applications provided a platform to develop fault-tolerant systems and these reconfigurable architectures requires an embedded network that is inherently fault-tolerant and capable of handling movement …

Do Per Capita Expenditures Affect The Quality Of State Government Management?, Rachael D. Putnam

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

In recent years, an increase in government accountability has come about in American society. The debate began about the consumer business model of government, with citizens demanding results, not just output, because most people viewed government as inefficient and ineffective. As a response, Vice President Gore National Performance Review endorsed the Government Performance and Results Act (1993) which required federal agencies to have “objective, quantifiable and measurable” goals into the federal government budget process (Kravchuk and Schack, 1996, p.348).

This, in turn, led the way to the Government Performance Project (GPP), a study orchestrated by the Governing magazine, in cooperation …

Kentucky Wineries Networking Activities For Tourism Development In Relation To Growth And Profitability, Lee Ann Berlin Walton

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Tourism plays a vital role in the success and sustainability of the wine industry in Kentucky. In order for the wine tourism industry to be successful in Kentucky, it is essential to continue to find ways to attract visitors to Kentucky wineries. Networking with competitors and other tourism industry stakeholders can be a successful way for winery owners to attract visitors to wineries; however, literature demonstrates that winery owners often need incentive to do so. This research explores the economic impacts of tourism on Kentuckys wineries that network with competitors and tourism industry stakeholders and those that do not. It …

A Locally Corrected Nystrm Method For Surface Integral Equations: An Object Oriented Approach, Bryan James Guernsey

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Classically, researchers in Computational Physics and specifically in Computational Electromagnetics have sought to find numerical solutions to complex physical problems. Several techniques have been developed to accomplish such tasks, each of which having advantages over their counterparts. Typically, each solution method has been developed separately despite having numerous commonalities with other methods. This fact motivates a unified software tool to house each solution method to avoid duplicating previous efforts. Subsequently, these solution methods can be used alone or in conjunction with one another in a straightforward manner. The aforementioned goals can be accomplished by using an Object Oriented software approach. …

Privacy Protection For Life-Log System, Jayashri S. Chaudhari

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Tremendous advances in wearable computing and storage technologies enable us to record not just snapshots of an event but the whole human experience for a long period of time. Such a \life-logandamp;quot; system captures important events as they happen, rather than an after-thought. Such a system has applications in many areas such as law enforcement, personal archives, police questioning, and medicine. Much of the existing eandamp;reg;orts focus on the pattern recognition and information retrieval aspects of the system. On the other hand, the privacy issues raised by such an intrusive system have not received much attention from the research community. …

Functionalized Polymeric Membranes For Bioseparation And Biocatalysis, Saurav Datta

Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering

Functionalized polymeric membrane based techniques are becoming increasingly popular in biotechnology, food and pharmaceutical industries due to their versatility and hydrodynamic benefits over traditional materials and methods. This research work has been directed towards the development of functionalized polymeric membranes, extensive experimental and theoretical analyses of some of the fundamental aspects of accessibility, membrane fouling and enzyme catalysis, and applications in affinity based bioseparation and biocatalysis. In this research work, the impact of different types of functionalization techniques, such as functionalization of different membrane materials, covalent and electrostatic immobilization, on interaction of various biomolecules and active sites in membrane has …

Cutting Propagation And Container Production Of Rudy Haag Burning Bush [Euonymus Alatus Rudy Haag], Amy Lynn Poston

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Softwood cuttings of Euonymus alatus and the cultivar Rudy Haag, a nearly seedless cultivar, were taken in Kentucky on two cutting dates. E. alatus Rudy Haag cuttings taken in mid-May, untreated or treated with 1000 - 3000 ppm IBA, produced many roots on a high percentage of cuttings. Post-rooting shoot growth was reduced for the species with cuttings taken in June. Rudy Haag produced new growth on cuttings taken in May with no IBA treatment. Transplanting resulted in a decrease in new growth. Liner plants of E. alatus Compactus and Rudy Haag were planted into 1 and 3 gallon containers …

Numerical Investigation And Parallel Computing For Thermal Transport Mechanism During Nanomachining, Ravi R. Kumar

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Nano-scale machining, or Nanomachining is a hybrid process in which the total thermal energy necessary to remove atoms from a work-piece surface is applied from external sources. In the current study, the total thermal energy necessary to remove atoms from a work-piece surface is applied from two sources: (1) localized energy from a laser beam focused to a micron-scale spot to preheat the work-piece, and (2) a high-precision electron-beam emitted from the tips of carbon nano-tubes to remove material via evaporation/sublimation. Macro-to-nano scale heat transfer models are discussed for understanding their capability to capture and its application to predict the …

Chiral 1, 2-Diamino Guests In Chain Replacement Peptidomimetics: A New Helical Motif, Marlon D. Jones

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Peptides are short, sequence and length specific oligomers composed of small amino acid residues. Nature has refined these peptide sequences and their endogenous function through evolution. In addition, peptides have played an important role in medicine, which has lead to further research into developing peptides as lead pharmaceuticals (therapeutic peptides). Unfortunately, therapeutic peptides are inferior as drug candidates due to their low oral bioavailability; immunogenicity and potential to be attacked by peptidases. Fortunately, peptides can be modified by steric constraints, cyclization, and/or replacement of the peptide backbone itself creating a mimic (peptidomimetic) of the original peptide. Peptidomimetics are deliberately designed …

Hebi Sani: Mental Well Being Among The Working Class Afro-Surinamese In Paramaribo, Suriname, Aminata Cairo

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation describes the results of a two year anthropological investigation into the concept of mental well being among the working class Afro-Surinamese population in Paramaribo, Suriname. More specifically, the research investigated how working class Afro-Surinamese in Paramaribo, Suriname define and maintain their sense of mental well-being, given their unique ethnic identity within a multi-ethnic and multicultural society, and given that their environment is heavily compromised by negative globalizing forces Over the course of two years a total of 62 people contributed information through group and individual interviews, which was supplemented by information obtained through participant observation. Findings show a …