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The Universality Of Solubility Divergence Effects In Multicomponent Liquid Mixtures, Pauline R. Norris

Dissertations

Critical point effects have been observed in pure fluids, ferromagnets, substitutional alloys, and in binary liquid mixtures having a miscibility gap. That these systems are disparate, while the phenomena observed are similar, serves as the basis for the statement of the Principle of Critical Point Universality, which governs all critical behavior. The effect of the critical point on solute solubility is readily observed; the solubility diverges towards infinity in the critical region. One finds in the critical region that the slope (∂ln solubility/ ∂ (1/Temperature)) of a plot of ln solubility vs 1/Temperature diverges toward infinity if only one composition …

Development Of Aerospace Sliding Mode Control Toolbox : Relative Degree Approach With Resource Prospector Lander And Launch Vehicle Case Studies, Sai Susheel Praneeth Kode

Dissertations

Sliding mode control and observation techniques are widely used in aerospace applications, including aircraft, UAVs, launch vehicles, missile interceptors, and hypersonic missiles. This work is dedicated to developing a MATLAB based sliding mode controller design and simulation software toolbox that aims to support aerospace vehicle applications. An architecture of the proposed aerospace sliding mode control toolbox (SMC Aero) using the relative degree approach is developed. The created SMC Aero libraries include the design of first order sliding mode control (1-SMC), second order sliding mode control (2-SMC), higher order sliding mode (HOSM) control (either fixed gain or adaptive), as well as …

Adaptive Element Spacing Synthesis Technique In Phased Array Antennas, Tanzeela Mitha

Dissertations

Phased array antennas are widely used in a variety of military and civilian applications. For a given application, their radiation characteristics, such as the sidelobes, position of the nulls, and the main beam direction, need to be altered to enhance the array performance. To control these properties for a given requirement, the elements of phased array antennas need to be either properly excited or physically rearranged in different periodic and aperiodic configurations. However, once the position of the elements is fixed to control a single aspect of the generated pattern, it cannot simultaneously fulfill any other specification. To further alter …

The Case For Alternate Media Requirement Expressions In Systems Engineering, Jason Kolligs

Dissertations

“Requirements” are often presented as a necessary, if not mandated, component or tool of the systems engineering process. Despite their place in engineering, low quality requirements are the first potential mistakes of an engineering project and their effects are potentially felt downstream in the form of increased costs and schedule overruns. Innovations to improve requirements engineering have historically omitted the requirement media. This research provides the rationale and process heuristics to include alternate media requirement expressions within systems engineering which shifts accountability to higher context requirement expressions that may require less cognitive load while decreasing effort and schedule thereby potentially …

An Investigation Of Mathematics Self-Efficacy, The Sources Of Mathematics Self-Efficacy, And Mathematics Achievement Among Primary School Students In Trinidad And Tobago, Ronald Sinanan

Dissertations

Purpose of the Study

This dissertation addressed two problems in the literature. Firstly, while many study findings have highlighted the critical role of self-efficacy in students' achievement, additional research was needed about the four hypothesized sources that influence the improvement of students' mathematics self-efficacy. Many studies on self-efficacy sources were conducted with measures not closely tied to social cognitive theory and have not demonstrated sufficient reliability. Using the Sources of Mathematics SelfEfficacy Scale, Usher and Pajares (2009) addressed this problem. They suggested several recommendations for future research (Usher & Pajares, 2008b, 2009), including exploring the validity of their scale in …

Isaac Newton As A Prophetic Interpreter, Kenneth Jørgensen

Dissertations

Throughout his life, Sir Isaac Newton was deeply dedicated to the science of decoding biblical apocalyptic writings. To understand and appreciate Newton's prophetic scheme, it will be advantagous to have a certain grasp of what sources and ideas might have influenced him. No comprehensive study before this one has helped us see Newton from that perspective. A survey of the development of canonical apocalyptic hermeneutic and interpretation, beginning before the time of Christ and ending with Newton, shows that four distinct systems of hermeneutics had developed by that time. Historicism was the earliest and the preferred system among Protestants until …

A Transformative Framework To Investigate The Influences Of Chineseness On Chinese International Students’ Learning Experiences On U.S. College Campuses, Wenjin Guo

Dissertations

This study applied a mixed-methods, social-justice approach to explore how Chinese international students interpret their success and/or challenges influenced by their Chinese forms of community cultural wealth in their academic learning at a predominately White Catholic university in the Midwest of the United States for over one year. I adopted a transformative paradigm to guide my study. Since the reviewed theoretical frameworks solely failed to form a profound comprehension of how Chineseness influenced Chinese international college students, I analyzed essential components of socio-cultural and critical race theories and created China as Method as the framework to guide my study.

This …

Rhodium-Catalyzed Decarbonylation Of Aroyl Chlorides, Wiktoria M. Koza

Dissertations

The development of efficient strategies for the synthesis of aryl–halogen bonds is highly desirable due to the prevalence of these moieties in pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and organic synthesis. Although there are numerous applications of aryl chlorides in chemistry, an efficient strategy for the preparation of these molecules is underdeveloped. Transition metal-catalyzed decarbonylation provides an efficient and selective approach for aryl–halogen bond formation. There has been significant progress in the development of new decarbonylation strategies, particularly involving aldehydes for the synthesis of new carbon–hydrogen (C–H) bonds or for cross-coupling reactions. However, transition metal-catalyzed decarbonylation methods for carbon–halogen (C–X) bond formation have been …

Supporting Latine Children’S Informal Engineering Learning And Spatial Thinking Through Tinkering And Storytelling, Diana Acosta

Dissertations

In the United States, the Latine community is the fastest growing minority group. Projections estimate that by the year 2060, they will represent 28% of the total population. Yet, Latines continue to be underrepresented and underserved in STEM fields and careers. Providing equitable informal STEM learning opportunities to young children may be a way to increase access and interest in STEM, to address the broader goal of increasing representation. Importantly, for these learning experiences to be truly equitable they must be meaningful and engage everyday cultural practices. Guided by a strengths-based approach, the current study examines how oral stories as …

Facing The Mass Exodus: Reconsidering The Moral Responsibilities For And Obligations Toward Large Numbers Of Refugees In An Age Of Global Crises, Muhammet Ali Asil

Dissertations

The global refugee crisis has revealed an essential moral question regarding helping the forcibly displaced persons in protracted refugee crises: how do we determine if our community has done “enough” for a particular refugee group? Different answers have been provided to this question. This dissertation takes up this question from a normative standpoint. It develops an ethics-based burden-sharing model, that is, a “meaning-based model,” as a method to determine our political communities’ moral duties toward different refugee groups in various refugee crises. The model challenges the conventional wisdom by claiming that not every community has the same moral obligations toward …

The Role Of Lived Experiences In Culturally Responsive School Leaders’ Administrations: A Phenomenological Case Study, Angela Dolezal

Dissertations

This phenomenological case study explored how the lived experiences of three self-identifiedculturally responsive high school leaders impacted the systemic decisions they made for their school and their students. The study also investigated how these lived experiences informed the leaders’ responses to their stakeholders’ reactions to the systemic decisions. The three school leaders participated in a three-part interview series to answer these three questions (1) What are the personal and educational life histories of three self-identified culturally responsive school leaders in a predominantly White school? (2) How do the life experiences described in the self-identified culturally responsive school leaders’ life histories …

An Ethics Of Doctrinal Emergence: Reading Newman With Augustine And Contemporary Information Theory, Jeffrey John Campbell

Dissertations

Jeffrey J. CampbellLoyola University Chicago AN ETHICS OF DOCTRINAL EMERGENCE: READING NEWMAN WITH AUGUSTINE AND CONTEMPORARY INFORMATION THEORY The aim of this essay is to begin the process of a reconfiguration of the theological category of doctrinal development and to integrate an “emergent doctrinal ethics of belief” as an inextricable dimension of this category. Most scholarly writing on doctrinal development has taken place in the wake of the Enlightenment with its focus on epistemology, and doctrine is conceived of as “referencing” a quasi-metaphysical “res.” I attempt to “update” the guiding metaphors of doctrinal development with the goal of moving discussions …

An Interpretive Phenomenological Study Of Women’S Struggles, Hopes And Reasons For Participation In Professional Power-Based Community Organizing In Chicago, Mary Dungy-Akenji

Dissertations

Mary K. L. DungyLoyola University Chicago AN INTERPRETIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF WOMEN’S STRUGGLES, HOPES AND REASONS FOR PARTICIPATION IN PROFESSIONAL POWER-BASED COMMUNITY ORGANIZING IN CHICAGO Professional power-based community organizing is a practice of grassroots change in which paid organizers guide community members as they band together to make demands on elite groups to redistribute resources (Bobo et. al, 2001; Sites et al., 2007). Conflict-based tactics may be utilized to demand structural improvements from key stakeholders, usually towards progressive political ends that build towards a more just society (Bobo et. al 2001; Wilkinson & D’Angelo, 2019). Community organizing has some roots …

Las Chingonas: An Ecological Approach To Latina Student Mothers’ Journey Through College, Emely Elizabeth Medina-Rodriguez

Dissertations

Women with children are one of the growing student sub-populations in higher education. However, the support student mothers receive in colleges and universities has been historically unreliable and their experiences in college have not been studied in depth. This is especially true for student mothers from minoritized backgrounds with differing racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, and ability identities. This research aims to understand the experiences Latina graduate student mothers from an ecological and critical perspective. Guided by Critical Human Ecology and Black Feminist Thought, eight open-ended interviews were conducted and analyzed. Themes and categories came out of the patterns in the …

The Souls Of Black Folks In The Twenty-First Century: Self-Efficacy, Grit, And Their Development In Low-Income Urban Black Youth, Amzie Moore

Dissertations

Self-efficacy and grit have shown to be internal resources for African American youth, particularly urban low-income youth living in high crime and high poverty communities. This dissertation is a quasi-experimental, longitudinal, and mix method study, which evaluated a cross-age peer mentoring program. This evaluation was to examine if youth mentors’ attendance in the program for one year predicted increases in their self-efficacy and grit. The results of the study revealed that age significantly interacted with youth attendance, predicting increases in self-efficacy. Findings from the qualitative analyses illustrated that the peer-mentoring program strengthened culturally-relevant self-efficacy and grit among youth mentors.

Constructing Engineering Knowledge Through Tinkering, Reflection, And Digital Storytelling, Lauren C. Pagano

Dissertations

Educators and researchers suggest that informal learning activities in museums, libraries, and families’ homes can promote children’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning (Sobel & Jipson, 2016). Tinkering, a form of hands-on problem-solving involving real tools and materials, is one way to engage families in engineering design processes. However, tinkering activities vary greatly in terms of the goals presented, the resources available, and opportunities to test (Bevan, 2017). Across three studies, we examined how variations in tinkering exhibit design and parent-child interaction relate to children’s memory and STEM learning. In Study 1, we examined the structure and content of …

Healing Earth In A Time Of Crisis: Curriculum For Integral Ecology, Caleb Steindam

Dissertations

This intrinsic multiple case study examined secondary- and university-level educators’ experiences teaching with Healing Earth, a curriculum developed by the International Jesuit Ecology Project at Loyola University Chicago, which merges scientific, social, spiritual, and ethical analyses of pressing ecological issues. Based on the conceptual framework of integral ecology, Healing Earth is a response to Pope Francis’s (2015a) call for “a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society and our relationship with nature” (§215).

This study primarily consisted of in-depth interviews with educators who have used Healing Earth in a variety of secondary and post-secondary Catholic educational contexts. A …

Dark Patterns: Effect On Overall User Experience And Site Revisitation, Deon Soul Calawen

Dissertations

Dark patterns are user interfaces purposefully designed to manipulate users into doing something they might not otherwise do for the benefit of an online service. This study investigates the impact of dark patterns on overall user experience and site revisitation in the context of airline websites. In order to assess potential dark pattern effects, two versions of the same airline website were compared: a dark version containing dark pattern elements and a bright version free of manipulative interfaces. User experience for both websites were assessed quantitatively through a survey containing a User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) and a System Usability Scale …

The Impact Of Emotion Focused Features On Svm And Mlr Models For Depression Detection, Alexandria Mulligan

Dissertations

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common mental health diagnosis with estimates upwards of 25% of the United States population remain undiagnosed. Psychomotor symptoms of MDD impacts speed of control of the vocal tract, glottal source features and the rhythm of speech. Speech enables people to perceive the emotion of the speaker and MDD decreases the mood magnitudes expressed by an individual. This study asks the questions: “if high level features deigned to combine acoustic features related to emotion detection are added to glottal source features and mean response time in support vector machines and multivariate logistic regression models, would …

Real-Time Stock Market Recommendation & Prediction Using Multi Source Data, Kalpana Konety

Dissertations

Stock investors must be cognizant of both the current price of their stock and the price at which they want to sell it in the future. This does not stop investors to monitor past price patterns and apply their knowledge to the present. ’Past performance is not an indicator of future success’, as the saying goes. To put it another way, historical stock data alone isn’t enough to forecast future stock prices. Another key factor to consider in a trading strategy is the impact of market psychology. Financial data, which is a type of multimedia data, provides a wealth of …

Exposing And Fixing Causes Of Inconsistency And Nondeterminism In Clustering Implementations, Xin Yin

Dissertations

Cluster analysis aka Clustering is used in myriad applications, including high-stakes domains, by millions of users. Clustering users should be able to assume that clustering implementations are correct, reliable, and for a given algorithm, interchangeable. Based on observations in a wide-range of real-world clustering implementations, this dissertation challenges the aforementioned assumptions.

This dissertation introduces an approach named SmokeOut that uses differential clustering to show that clustering implementations suffer from nondeterminism and inconsistency: on a given input dataset and using a given clustering algorithm, clustering outcomes and accuracy vary widely between (1) successive runs of the same toolkit, i.e., nondeterminism, and …

Model Checks For Two-Sample Location-Scale, Atefeh Javidialsaadi

Dissertations

Two-sample location-scale refers to a model that permits a pair of standardized random variables to have a common distribution. This means that if X₁ and X₂ are two random variables with means µ₁ and µ₂ and standard deviations ?₁ and ?₂, then (X₁ - µ₁)/?₁ and (X₂ - µ₂)/?₂ have some common unspecified standard or base distribution F₀. Function-based hypothesis testing for these models refers to formal tests that would help determine whether or not two samples may have come from some location-scale …

On Performance Optimization And Prediction Of Parallel Computing Frameworks In Big Data Systems, Haifa Alquwaiee

Dissertations

A wide spectrum of big data applications in science, engineering, and industry generate large datasets, which must be managed and processed in a timely and reliable manner for knowledge discovery. These tasks are now commonly executed in big data computing systems exemplified by Hadoop based on parallel processing and distributed storage and management. For example, many companies and research institutions have developed and deployed big data systems on top of NoSQL databases such as HBase and MongoDB, and parallel computing frameworks such as MapReduce and Spark, to ensure timely data analyses and efficient result delivery for decision making and business …

Coherent Control Of Dispersive Waves, Jimmie Adriazola

Dissertations

This dissertation addresses some of the various issues which can arise when posing and solving optimization problems constrained by dispersive physics. Considered here are four technologically relevant experiments, each having their own unique challenges and physical settings including ultra-cold quantum fluids trapped by an external field, paraxial light propagation through a gradient index of refraction, light propagation in periodic photonic crystals, and surface gravity water waves over shallow and variable seabeds. In each of these settings, the physics can be modeled by dispersive wave equations, and the technological objective is to design the external trapping fields or propagation media such …

Private And Federated Deep Learning: System, Theory, And Applications For Social Good, Han Hu

Dissertations

During the past decade, drug abuse continues to accelerate towards becoming the most severe public health problem in the United States. The ability to detect drug­abuse risk behavior at a population scale, such as among the population of Twitter users, can help to monitor the trend of drug­abuse incidents. However, traditional methods do not effectively detect drug­abuse risk behavior in tweets, mainly due to the sparsity of such tweets and the noisy nature of tweets. In the first part of this dissertation work, the task of classifying tweets as containing drug­abuse risk behavior or not, is studied. Millions of public …

Hydrophobically Modified Isosorbide Dimethacrylates As Biomaterials For Bisphenol A Free Dental Fillings, Bilal Marie

Dissertations

Amalgam and Bisphenol A glycerolate dimethacrylate (BisGMA) are the main dental filling materials in use today. Because of the negative perception of amalgam and its lower esthetic appeal, as well as the desire to replace the endocrine disruptor Bisphenol A, which is the building block of BisGMA, there has been a critical need to search for safer alternatives to these dental filling materials.

Isosorbide is a sugar-based molecule generally recognized as safe. It has been extensively studied as a replacement to the Bisphenol A core in various materials. However, isosorbide is extremely hygroscopic, and water uptake in dental fillings causes …

Experimental And Computational Studies Of Functionalized Carbon Nanotubes For Use In Energy Storage Devices And Membranes, Emine S. Karaman

Dissertations

Electrolytes with good interfacial stability are a crucial component of any electrochemical device. The development of novel gel polymer electrolytes (GEs) with good interface stability and better manufacturability is important for the development of the next generation electrochemical devices. Gel electrolytes are hybrid electrolyte materials, combining benefits of both liquid and solid systems. Compared with liquid and solid electrolytes, GEs open new design opportunities and do not require rigorous encapsulation methods. In this dissertation, studies on functionalized carbon nanotubes (fCNTs) and graphene oxide (GO) doped polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) based gel electrolytes (GEs) are reported. The ionic conductivity and mechanical strength …

A Practical Approach To Automated Software Correctness Enhancement, Aleksandr Zakharchenko

Dissertations

To repair an incorrect program does not mean to make it correct; it only means to make it more-correct, in some sense, than it is. In the absence of a concept of relative correctness, i.e. the property of a program to be more-correct than another with respect to a specification, the discipline of program repair has resorted to various approximations of absolute (traditional) correctness, with varying degrees of success. This shortcoming is concealed by the fact that most program repair tools are tested on basic cases, whence making them absolutely correct is not clearly distinguishable from making them relatively more-correct. …

Parameter Estimation And Inference Of Spatial Autoregressive Model By Stochastic Gradient Descent, Gan Luan

Dissertations

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular iterative method for model parameter estimation in large-scale data and online learning settings since it goes through the data in only one pass. While SGD has been well studied for independent data, its application to spatially-correlated data largely remains unexplored. This dissertation develops SGD-based parameter estimation and statistical inference algorithms for the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model, a common model for spatial lattice data.

This research contains three parts. (I) The first part concerns SGD estimation and inference for the SAR mean regression model. A new SGD algorithm based on maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) …

Scalable Scientific Data Management On High-Performance Computing Systems, Zhenbo Qiao

Dissertations

As high-performance computing (HPC) is being scaled up to exascale to accommodate new modeling and simulation needs, I/O has continued to be a major bottleneck in the end-to-end scientific processes. To bridge the widening gap between compute and I/O, and enable data to be more efficiently stored and analyzed, simulation outputs need to be refactored, reduced, and appropriately mapped to storage tiers. Also, a major question that the community is striving to answer is how to co-design data storage and complex physics-rich analytics in a way that the time to knowledge can be minimized in post-processing. As HPC storage systems …