Digital Commons Network^™

Non-Cognitive Factors Affecting Undergraduate Student Success In Core Composition Courses, Samantha J. Spitak

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The intention of this study was to determine what, if any, non-cognitive factors affect student performance in core composition courses. "Non-cognitive factor" is a term referring to non-academic and non-intellectual characteristics of a student's experience. These factors may be emotional, environmental, psychosocial, etc. Some prior research has been conducted on non-cognitive factors relating to admission of minority populations, but this research is likely to be outdated. Six potential non-cognitive factors were proposed for this study: Confidence, Motivation, Socioeconomic Class, Emotional Support, Campus Climate, and Living Situation. The results of this study indicated that non-cognitive factors do influence student performance in …

A Distributed Surrogate Methodology For Inverse Most Probable Point Searches In Reliability Based Design Optimization, James Davidson

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Surrogate models are commonly used in place of prohibitively expensive computational models to drive iterative procedures necessary for engineering design and analysis such as global optimization. Additionally, surrogate modeling has been applied to reliability based design optimization which constrains designs to those which provide a satisfactory reliability against failure considering system parameter uncertainties. Through surrogate modeling the analysis time is significantly reduced when the total number of evaluated samples upon which the final model is built is less than the number which would have otherwise been required using the expensive model directly with the analysis algorithm. Too few samples will …

Dna-Nucleobase Guanine As Passivation/Gate Dielectric Layer For Flexible Gfet-Based Sensor Applications, Adrienne Dee Williams

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The main goal of this dissertation was two-fold: first, to study and design a graphene-based transistor environmentally friendly by replacing a standard substrate and gate dielectric with different flexible/rigid and biodegradable films and secondly, to study their effects on graphene's charge carrier mobility. A thin film of deoxyribonucleic acid nucleobase purine guanine deposited by physical vapor deposition onto up to ten layers of graphene that were transferred onto various rigid and flexible substrates was characterized more thoroughly. Several test platforms were fabricated with guanine 1) as a standalone gate dielectric, 2) as the control and 3) as a passivation layer …

Mission-Aware Vulnerability Assessment For Cyber-Physical System, Xiaotian Wang

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Designing secure cyber-physical systems (CPS) is fundamentally important. An indispensable step towards this end is to perform vulnerability assessment. This thesis discusses the design and implementation of a mission-aware CPS vulnerability assessment framework. The framework intends to accomplish three objectives including i) mapping CPS mission into infrastructural components, ii) evaluating global impact of each vulnerability, and iii) achieving verifiable results and high flexibility. In order to accomplish these objectives, a model-based analysis strategy is employed. Specifically, a CPS simulator is used to model dynamic behaviors of CPS components under different missions; the framework facilitates a bottom-up approach to traverse a …

Domain-Specific Document Retrieval Framework For Near Real-Time Social Health Data, Swapnil Soni

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With the advent of web search and microblogging, the percentage of Online Health Information Seekers (OHIS) using these services to share and seek health information in real-time has increased exponentially. Recently, Twitter has emerged as one of the primary mediums for sharing and seeking of the latest information related to a variety of topics, including health information. Although Twitter is an excellent information source, the identification of useful information from the deluge of tweets is one of the major challenges. Twitter search is limited to keyword-based techniques to retrieve information for a given query and sometimes the results do not …

Automatic Emotion Identification From Text, Wenbo Wang

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People's emotions can be gleaned from their text using machine learning techniques to build models that exploit large self-labeled emotion data from social media. Further, the self-labeled emotion data can be effectively adapted to train emotion classifiers in different target domains where training data are sparse.

Emotions are both prevalent in and essential to most aspects of our lives. They influence our decision-making, affect our social relationships and shape our daily behavior. With the rapid growth of emotion-rich textual content, such as microblog posts, blog posts, and forum discussions, there is a growing need to develop algorithms and techniques for …

The Use Of Antibody-Coated Latex Beads To Determine Single Positive And Double Positive Mouse Spleen Cells Expressing Cd5 And/Or Cd19 Glycoproteins, Abdulrazzag Abdulaziz Othman

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Flow cytometry is the standard method used to diagnose, stage, and monitor patients' response to the treatment given by counting the numbers of CD5, CD19 and CD5+ CD19+ B lymphocytes. In this study, a comparison was done between numbers of single CD5+, single CD19+ and dual CD5+ CD19+ mouse spleen B lymphocytes using flow cytometry and antibody-latex beads. The bead method involved antibody-coated latex bead and yielded results similar to those of flow cytometry. For cells exhibiting both markers (CD5+ CD19+), the bead method used antibody-coated beads of two different colors yielded similar results to those of flow cytometry results. …

Relating Reactive Transport To Hierarchical And Multiscale Sedimentary Architecture, Mohamad Reza Soltanian

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This dissertation addresses the transport of reactive solutes in groundwater. The goal is to better link reactive transport processes to what is known about sedimentary architecture. New forms of Lagrangian-based models for the processes of retardation and dispersion are derived through linking the models to hierarchical and multiscale sedimentary architecture. This allows for a fundamental understanding of how these processes arise from the hierarchical architecture of sedimentary facies, and allows for a quantitative decomposition of these processes into facies-related contributions at different scales within the hierarchy.

The main focus is on reactive transport characterized by a high Damkohler number, DN, …

Knowledge Enabled Location Prediction Of Twitter Users, Revathy Krishnamurthy

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As the popularity of online social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook continues to rise, the volume of textual content generated on the web is increasing rapidly. The mining of user generated content in social media has proven effective in domains ranging from personalization and recommendation systems to crisis management. These applications stand to be further enhanced by incorporating information about the geo-position of social media users in their analysis. Due to privacy concerns, users are largely reluctant to share their location information. As a consequence of this, researchers have focused on automatic inferencing of location information from the …

Efficacy Of Mastery-Based And Autonomy-Supportive Neuroanatomy Curriculum In Graduate Level Human Neurobiology Course, Corin Wolfgang Magee

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Anatomy provides scientists with a common vocabulary for discussing the human body, and is, therefore, an important aspect of science education. Literature shows that traditional teaching methods may be enhanced by the employment of mastery-based learning in an autonomy-supportive environment. The present study sought to determine the effects of these teaching strategies on the learning of neuroanatomy in a graduate neurobiology course.

These results show students learned and reportedly enjoyed learning a large amount of neuroanatomy. Experimentally taught students who completed the curriculum did well on the 30-item neuroanatomy quiz (mean score 81%), which was administered at the end of …

Water Quality Of The Upper Little Miami River Watershed In Ohio: Impacts Of Natural And Anthropogenic Processes, David Allan Huff

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Stream water quality is increasingly threatened by expanding anthropogenic activities, mainly through point source discharges and urban and agricultural runoffs of contaminants getting through a water body's watershed resulting in pollution. Concerns developed as to whether urban or agricultural type activities were causing most water quality impairment issues in the upper Little Miami River watershed in southwest Ohio.

Characterizing the upper Little Miami River (LMR) watershed with respect to water chemistry and Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) while evaluating the sources of any higher than expected natural parameter concentrations, with a strong emphasis on the nutrients phosphorus and nitrate, serves as …

Tuning The Physical Properties Of Poly(Arylene Ether)S Prepared From 3,5-Difluorobenzene Sulfonamides, Renata Mitton

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A series of functionalized poly(arylene ether)s, PAEs, based on 3,5-difluorobenzene sulfonamides with varying groups on the sulfonamide moiety were investigated. The main goal of the project was to tune the physical properties of the PAEs by altering the organic groups present on the sulfonamide nitrogen atom, including combinations of aryl iodide, alkyl, allyl, 4-ethoxycarboxylphenyl and benzyl moieties.

Using 3,5-difluorobenzenesulfonyl chloride as a starting material, N-R1-N-R2-3,5-difluorobenzenesulfonamides were prepared, followed by conversion to the corresponding PAEs by reaction of 3,5-difluorobenzene sulfonamides with Bisphenol-A, via a typical NAS polycondensation. Copolymers with varying contents of the functional monomer ranging from 10 to 25 %, …

Detecting Structure In Activity Sequences: Exploring The Hot Hand Phenomenon, Taleri Lynn Hammack

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Can humans discriminate whether strings of events (e.g., shooting success in basketball) were generated by a random or constrained process (e.g., hot and cold streaks)? Conventional wisdom suggests that humans are not good at this discrimination. Following from Cooper, Hammack, Lemasters, and Flach (2014), a series of Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical experiment examined the abilities of both humans and statistical tests (Wald-Wolfowitz Runs Test and 1/f) to detect specific constraints that are representative of plausible factors that might influence the performance of athletes (e.g., learning, non-stationary task constraints). Using a performance/success dependent learning constraint that was calibrated to …

A Language For Inconsistency-Tolerant Ontology Mapping, Kunal Sengupta

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Ontology alignment plays a key role in enabling interoperability among various data sources present in the web. The nature of the world is such, that the same concepts differ in meaning, often so slightly, which makes it difficult to relate these concepts. It is the omni-present heterogeneity that is at the core of the web. The research work presented in this dissertation, is driven by the goal of providing a robust ontology alignment language for the semantic web, as we show that description logics based alignment languages are not suitable for aligning ontologies.

The adoption of the semantic web technologies …

Evaluating Threats To The Rare Butterfly, Pieris Virginiensis, Samantha Lynn Davis

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Humans have caused drastic changes in ecosystems and communities through their modification of the natural landscape. Rare species, often highly specialized, are more impacted by these changes. Pieris virginiensis is a rare butterfly native to eastern North America that is a species of concern due to negative influences from habitat loss and plant invasion. This thesis discusses several threats to P. virginiensis, including habitat loss, climate change, competition, and the cascading effects of a novel European invasive plant, Alliaria petiolata, that attracts oviposition but does not allow for larval survival.

First, I examined a local extinction event and …

Compressive Sensing Analog Front End Design In 180 Nm Cmos Technology, Julin Mukeshkumar Shah

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In order to accurately reconstruct signal waveform a signal must be sampled at least twice as fast as the bandwidth of the signal. Ultra Wideband (UWB) signals have extraordinary potential for high information transmission while a central focus of wireless has been the mobile communication. It is an emerging area that involves development of RF sensing and spectral applications over multiple GHz bandwidths. Even though our technology is improving, it is very challenging to build ADC's that are compatible and keep up with the growth of ultra-wideband range. Compressive sensing does "sampling" and "compressing" at the same time and exploits …

World-Wide Body Size Patterns In Freshwater Fish By Geography, Size Class, Trophic Level, And Taxonomy, Shishir Adhikari

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The unifying themes of my thesis are patterns in world-wide freshwater fish body sizes and their underlying mechanisms. First, I explored Bergmann's rule in unprecedented detail, which states that body size is negatively correlated to temperature. Categorizing species by body size into quantiles and by trophic levels, I regressed the classes against latitude, temperature, seasonality, minimum temperature and habitable space. I found that Bergmann's rule applies to freshwater fish in general but the strength varies by size class and trophic levels. I concluded that Bergmann's rule in fish is driven by the exclusion of small fish from cold climate due …

Work Function Modification Of Metal Electrodes Via Printing Of Pedot:Pss And Carbon Nanotubes, Carly A. Jordan

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Work function tunability of metal electrodes provides a route to improving performance of organic electronic devices. Using an electrode with a different work function changes the potential barrier at the polymer/electrode interface, leading to altered device characteristics, such as turn-on voltage in light emitting diodes or series resistance photodiodes. In this work, we explore work function modification by employing solution-based conducting materials, poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) : poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs), printed as overcoatings on oxidized Ni. The capability of direct write technologies, namely inkjet and aerosol jet printing, to control thin film thickness is investigated. The correlation between film …

Orthogonal Moment-Based Human Shape Query And Action Recognition From 3d Point Cloud Patches, Huaining Cheng

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With the recent proliferation of 3D sensors such as Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), it is essential to develop feature representation methods that can best characterize the point clouds produced by these devices. When these devices are employed in targeting and surveillance of human actions from both ground and aerial platforms, the corresponding point clouds of body shape often comprise low-resolution, disjoint, and irregular patches of points resulted from self-occlusions and viewing angle variations. The prevailing method of depth image analysis has the limitation of relying on 2D features that are not native representation of 3D spatial relationships. On the …

Cognitive Analysis Of Multi-Sensor Information, Elizabeth Lynn Fox

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Multispectral imagery can supply an observer with different components of information to, in combination, lead to critical decisions. Human observers can be presented with two fusion techniques: 1) cognitive fusion presents the two sensor images within 5 degrees of visual angle and 2) algorithmic fusion aims to enhance image quality by combining relevant information from two individual sensor images into one composite image. Researchers have used methods such as comparing performance across different algorithms or comparing algorithmic fusion to a single-sensor image. However, cognitive fusion is a technique that provides all of the sensor information and, if utilized efficiently, may …

Modern Digital Chirp Receiver: Theory, Design And System Integration, Stephen Ray Benson

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Chirp signals can achieve a high range resolution without sacrificing SNR or maximum range, making them a strong candidate for use in radar and sonar applications. Chirp signals are also power efficient and resistant to interference, making them well suited for communication applications as well. The proposed digital high chirp rate receivers will showcase the use of digital instantaneous frequency measurement (IFM) devices for high chirp rate measurement. The receivers are paired with a high resolution time-of-arrival algorithm, capable of detecting the TOA and TOD of a pulse with an average error of less than 2ns. The high resolution pulse …

Performance Prediction Of Quantization Based Automatic Target Recognition Algorithms, Matthew Steven Horvath

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The difficulty of designing automatic target recognition (ATR) systems is that there are many sources of potential variation in the data, often referred to as operating conditions (OCs). Typical evaluation methodologies rely on empirical simulations on fixed datasets, where it can be difficult to fully sample the variations the algorithm will see in application. Here we focus on analytic performance prediction approaches to quantization based algorithms where the sources of variation are assumed conditionally independent. We have focused on three algorithms in particular: multinomial pattern matching (MPM), quantized grayscale matching (QGM), and a quantized mean-squared error approach (QMSE). The first …

Accelerated Degradation Of Chlorinated Solvents By Nanoscale Zero-Valent Iron Coated With Iron Monosulfide And Stabilized With Carboxymethyl Cellulose, Shirin Ghahghaei Nezamabadi

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Nanoscale zero-valent iron (nZVI) injections have proven to be a promising approach for the remediation of aquifers contaminated by chlorinated organic pollutants. This study compares the efficacy of nZVI in sulfidated and unamended forms in degrading selected chlorinated hyrocarbons (CHCs). Results show that nZVI amended with iron monosulfide (FeS) increases the rate of dechlorination of CT, CF and 1,1,1-TCA compared to that by unamended nZVI. The focus of this research was to characterize degradation kinetics and degradation byproduct distributions of CT, CF and 1,1,1-TCA by nZVI coated by iron monosulfide, which is represented as nZVI/FeS. To prevent nZVI particles from …

A Fight For Equity: School Desegregation, Public High Schools, And Why African-American Males Have Lower Academic Achievement, Tanisha S. Pruitt

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The objective of this thesis is to examine the lowered academic achievement of African- American males since the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka Kansas court decision that ruled in favor of school desegregation. The research shows that school desegregation was intended to allow African Americans educational equity with their White counterparts. Since Brown v. Board, there has been increased academic achievement for African-American females and lowered achievement among males. Predictions were made that poverty and low motivation affect academic achievement for African-American males. Regression analyses yielded results showing poverty and motivation were statistically significant; however, neither of the variables …

The Effect Of Scalp Tissue On Current Shunting During Anodal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (Tdcs), Mark Patrick Jackson

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Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has been used to treat various mental and neurological illnesses. Rodent models have been used to examine physiological changes in the brain after tDCS, as well as to develop safety standards. However, most animal tDCS studies implant an electrode on the brain, potentially altering the path of current during stimulation. Additionally, no studies have been completed specifically examining maximum safe anodal tDCS limits, and a pilot study conducted to determine an electrode montage to examine biological changes of learning and memory from anodal tDCS indicated brain lesion was occurring before a commonly cited lesion threshold …

Differences In Fecal Metabolite Profiles From Geographically Distinct Populations Of Adolescents, Jessica Moncivaiz

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Microbiota of the gastrointestinal tract have a variety of functions within the human body. They participate in protection of the host from pathogens, aid in immune system development and regulation, and carry out a variety of metabolic functions. This study focuses on the ability of gut microbiota to create metabolites through the degradation of food products. Using 1H NMR on fecal water extracts, I compared the metabolite profiles of two geographically distinct cohorts: healthy adolescents from Egypt (n=28) and healthy adolescents from the United States (n=14). Multivariate statistical analyses of binned NMR data confirmed that samples separated into groups corresponding …

High Temperature Transient Creep Analysis Of Metals, Sara Mirmasoudi

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The ability to design vehicles capable of reaching hypersonic speeds has become a necessity to satisfy industry requirements, hence requiring the need for better understanding of creep behavior of materials. Although the steady state creep of metals has been analyzed rigorously, there is little known about transient creep of many metals. Understanding transient creep behavior of metals is crucial in analysis and design of short term hypersonic flight applications. Hence, a transient creep analysis of 304SS, Al7075-T6, Al2024-T6, Inconel 625, Inconel 718, and Rene N4 is carried out focusing on the microstructural behavior of these metals undergoing high temperature operating …

Measuring Brain Activation Through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Fmri) During Visual Task Learning, Mohd Saif Usmani

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The purpose of this study is to understand the brain activity associated with learning a visual task by utilizing the applications of functional magnetic resonance imaging in cognitive neuroscience. The study was performed using two visual tasks referred to as aircraft and control, respectively. We compared the brain activation of these two visual tasks to understand the learning process of the participants. Fifteen young adults, ten males and five females, ranging in age from 19 to 35 years, participated in a ten-week study. Eight participants dropped out either voluntarily or were excluded for different reasons. The data analysis was completed …

Ontology Pattern-Based Data Integration, Adila Alfa Krisnadhi

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Data integration is concerned with providing a unified access to data residing at multiple sources. Such a unified access is realized by having a global schema and a set of mappings between the global schema and the local schemas of each data source, which specify how user queries at the global schema can be translated into queries at the local schemas. Data sources are typically developed and maintained independently, and thus, highly heterogeneous. This causes difficulties in integration because of the lack of interoperability in the aspect of architecture, data format, as well as syntax and semantics of the data. …

Polymerization Of Peek Ab Monomers With Oxyalkylene Linkages Via Nas And Friedel-Crafts Reactions, Shannon Theresa Hennelly

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The synthesis of the NAS monomer, 4-fluoro-4'-(2-(4-benzyloxyphenoxy)ethoxy) benzophenone, was envisioned as a two-step process. Thus, the synthesis of 4-fluoro- 4'-(2-(4-benzyloxyphenoxy)ethoxy)benzophenone was accomplished by the reaction of 4-fluoro-4'-hydroxybenzophenone and 1-(benzyloxy)-4-(2bromoethoxy) benzene. Hydrogenation of 4-fluoro-4'-(2-(4-benzyloxyphenoxy)ethoxy) benzophenone with 10% Pd/C was used to successfully remove the benzylic ether protective group, however, the reaction also reduced the benzophenone carbonyl. The synthesis of the EAS monomer, 4-(2-(4-phenoxyphenoxy)ethoxy)benzoic acid, was also a two-step process. The reaction of ethyl p-(2-hydroxyethoxy)benzoate and 4-phenoxyphenol gave ethyl 4-(2-(4-phenoxyphenoxy)ethoxy)benzoate in good yield. This ester could be easily hydrolyzed to 4-(2-(4-pheonxyphenoxy)ethoxybenzoic acid. The polymerization of the EAS monomer, 4-(2-(4-pheonxyphenoxy)ethoxybenzoic acid, was carried …