Digital Commons Network^™

Investigating The Impact Of Nonenzymatic Lysine Acetylation On The Function Of The Bacterial Ribosome, Sarah Caldwell Feid

Dissertations

An under-investigated target of lysine acetylation is the bacterial ribosome. Although lysine acetylations on the ribosome are common and conversed in diverse bacterial species, little work has been done to understand how lysine acetylation affects the bacterial ribosome. The goal of this work is to determine if lysine acetylation has functional impact on the bacterial ribosome.I have identified in vitro and in vivo effects of nonenzymatic, AcP-dependent lysine acetylation on translation and the ribosome. In vitro acetylation of transcription-translation reactions causes a translation-specific defect that is unaffected by the addition of the CobB deacetylase. This suggests certain AcP-sensitive residues that …

Perceptions Of The Grant Decision-Making Process: A Study Of Foundation Grantmakers And Grant Seekers Who Focus On Youth Violence In Chicago, Illinois, Patiya Freely

Dissertations

Local partners like churches, schools, and community organizations are often at the front lines of addressing the problem of recurring deadly violence against Black urban youth. Foundation grants are frequently used to fund their work. While foundations annually award millions of dollars in grants to community-based organizations addressing youth violence, there is little detailed information available about the foundation grantmaking decision-making process. Notably, there is a lack of research on the determinants of the grant decision-making process that may inadvertently affect grantee outcomes and ultimately the of beneficiary organizations and communities.A sample of ten decision-makers who had funded or sought …

Gardening And Watering 21st Century Soil: Culturally Responsive And Technology Enhanced Instructional Design In K12 Schools, Elissa W. Frazier

Dissertations

Decades of research have documented the positive impact of culturally responsive teaching on academic outcomes for African American and LatinX students. However, as the field of education has become increasingly embedded with technology as a powerful tool of instruction, more attention is needed to understand how culturally responsive teachers use technology to close achievement gaps. Although national public policy over the last twenty-years has documented the negative impact of the digital divide on low SES, African American and LatinX students, large-scale efforts to close the divide have focused primarily on access to devices only. More recently, the second digital “use” …

Understanding Secularized People Of Metro Manila: A Case Study Approach For A Contextualized Urban Ministry Strategy, Ermela T. Dizon

Dissertations

Problem

Secularization shapes people's thinking, feeling, and behaving in the cities. Yearly, there is a rise in the number of de-religionized or secularized people in cities of the world who engage in pursuits of materialism and show declining interest in religion. Sociologists and missiologists postulate about the spectrum of secularity and the variety of secularism in different context. Since Metro Manila is one of the world's top highly urbanized and densely populated cities, the Seventh-day Adventist Church encounters challenges in reaching its secularized people. It is a new turf for the church. Pastors trained for rural settings may not understand …

Self-Regulation And Academic Motivation As Predictors Of Academic Achievement Of Undergraduate Students In An Online Learning Environment, Sonia Almwalad

Dissertations

Problem

Online learning is a form of distance education that occurs via the Internet (Adams, 2004; Carliner, 1999). The success of online learning depends on student-related factors such as acceptance, willingness, and motivation (Almaiah et al., 2019; Almaiah et al., 2020). When online learning systems are not utilized, students cannot realize the concomitant benefit of improved performance. Online learning has many positives, but it does present a problem when it comes to academic success. Motivation and self-regulation are two of the key factors for successful online learning given that students are subject to minimal supervision or guidance from teachers in …

An Examination Of The Influence Of Ethnic Identity, Spirituality, And Social Support As Predictors Of Resilience Among Black Male College Graduates Born In The United States, Sandy Belizaire

Dissertations

Problem

This study aimed to assess the influence of ethnic identity, spirituality, and social support on resilience among Black males (BM) who were born in the United States of America and are recent college graduates. The achievement gap between BM and their counterparts is among education's most infuriating problems. Educators are more likely to dissuade Black men from going to college, and those who enroll drop out before they graduate (Noguera 2003; Wilborn 2013).

Method

This study employed a non-experimental, quantitative correlation research design using self-report questionnaires. The target population for this study was American-born Black males who were graduates …

Fermi-Gbm : The 10 Year Spectral Catalog And Exploring Physically-Motivated Models To Fit Gamma-Ray Burst Spectra, Suraj Poolakkil

Dissertations

Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs) are ultra-relativistic jets of plasma and radiation formed by two known progenitors: core-collapse supernovae (a.k.a. “collapsars”) and binary mergers of compact objects, especially neutron stars. They have been studied extensively since their discovery in the 1960s, but many aspects of their prompt emission remain a mystery. In the first part of this dissertation I present the systematic spectral analyses of GRBs detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor during its first ten years of operation. It consists of spectral fits from 2297 GRBs, resulting in a compendium of over 18,000 spectra. In the second part, I explore …

Teaching Shante Curtelia Dominique Ophelia Brown Johnson : An Autoethnography Of A Black Male, Seventh-Day Adventist, Jazz Avant-Garde Artist, Michael Gayle

Dissertations

Leadership is part and parcel of societies and cultures. Leadership research can provide understanding that in turn provides knowledge, resources and growth opportunities for leaders. Leadership may be understood from a personal perspective as being bound up with identity. As I examine myself as a person and as a leader, I realize that several identities are prominent: Black male identity, Christian identity, jazz avant-garde artistic identity. Each of those identities have features that contribute to leadership.

The purpose of this study is to describe and explore leadership experiences of a Black male, from the Seventh-day Adventist Christian tradition who is …

Childhood Trauma And The Faith Maturity Of Seventh-Day Adventist Pastors And Seminarians, Pete A. Palmer

Dissertations

Problem

Unfortunately, Childhood Trauma is a fact of life. For instance, children lose parents/guardians through death or divorce. Children grow up in impoverished situations. Children have parents who suffer from mental illness and/or commit suicide. In addition, more unfortunately, some children are mistreated, neglected, and/or abused. The long-lasting impact of Childhood Trauma includes increased morbidity and mortality, and decreased opportunities for prosperity. This research sought to establish a statistical relationship between Childhood Trauma and Faith Maturity. Childhood Trauma has been demonstrated to affect attachment processes in children and, since religion is an attachment process and God is an attachment figure, …

The Struggles Black Women Face In Federally Qualified Community Health Centers In South Carolina: A Phenomenological Exploration Of Women In Leadership Positions, Sharon Black

Dissertations

This qualitative interpretive phenomenological study examined the professional lived experiences of Black women who hold leadership positions within Federally Qualified Community Health Centers (FQHCs) in South Carolina. The researcher examined their experiences through the lens of Belenky’s (1986) Ways of Knowing framework, focusing on self-expression, voice, and how the participants processed their leadership experiences. In addition, the study draws on Crenshaw’s Intersectionality and Black Feminist Post-structuralist theories. The study explores the difficulties, successes, and strategies these women use, focusing on stereotypes, challenges in leadership roles, diversity of experiences, and the importance of voice themes.

The study provides practical suggestions for …

A Computational Model Of Trust Based On Dynamic Interaction In The Stack Overflow Community, Patrick O’Neill

Dissertations

A member’s reputation in an online community is a quantified representation of their trustworthiness within the community. Reputation is calculated using rules-based algorithms which are primarily tied to the upvotes or downvotes a member receives on posts. The main drawback of this form of reputation calculation is the inability to consider dynamic factors such as a member’s activity (or inactivity) within the community. The research involves the construction of dynamic mathematical models to calculate reputation and then determine to what extent these results compare with rules-based models. This research begins with exploratory research of the existing corpus of knowledge. Constructive …

Exploring Gender Bias In Semantic Representations For Occupational Classification In Nlp: Techniques And Mitigation Strategies, Joseph Michael O'Carroll

Dissertations

Gender bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP) models is a non-trivial problem that can perpetuate and amplify existing societal biases. This thesis investigates gender bias in occupation classification and explores the effectiveness of different debiasing methods for language models to reduce the impact of bias in the model’s representations. The study employs a data-driven empirical methodology focusing heavily on experimentation and result investigation. The study uses five distinct semantic representations and models with varying levels of complexity to classify the occupation of individuals based on their biographies.

Evaluating The Performance Of Vulkan Glsl Compute Shaders In Real-Time Ray-Traced Audio Propagation Through 3d Virtual Environments, James Buggy

Dissertations

Real time ray tracing is a growing area of interest with applications in audio processing. However, real time audio processing comes with strict performance requirements, which parallel computing is often used to overcome. As graphics processing units (GPUs) have become more powerful and programmable, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) has allowed GPUs to become extremely powerful parallel processors, leading them to become more prevalent in the domain of audio processing through platforms such as CUDA. The aim of this research was to investigate the potential of GLSL compute shaders in the domain of real time audio processing. Specifically …

Evaluation Of Text Transformers For Classifying Sentiment Of Reviews By Using Tf-Idf, Bert (Word Embedding), Sbert (Sentence Embedding) With Support Vector Machine Evaluation, Mina Jamshidian

Dissertations

As the online world evolves and new media emerge, consumers are sharing their reviews and opinions online. This has been studied in various academic fields, including marketing and computer science. Sentiment analysis, a technique used to identify the sentiment of a piece of text, has been researched in different domains such as movie reviews and mobile app ratings. However, the video game industry has received relatively little research on experiential products. The purpose of this study is to apply sentiment analysis to user reviews of games on Steam, a popular gaming platform, in order to produce actionable results. The video …

Application Of Shallow Neural Networks To Retail Intermittent Demand Time Series, Urko Allende

Dissertations

Accurate sales predictions are essential for businesses in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry. However, their demand forecasts are often unreliable, leading to imprecisions that affect downstream decisions. This dissertation proposes using an artificial neural network to improve intermittent demand forecasting in the retail sector. The research investigates the validity of using unprocessed historical information, eluding hand-crafted features, to learn patterns in intermittent demand data. The experiment tests a selection of shallow neural network architectures that can expedite the time-to-market in comparison to conventional demand forecasting methods. The results demonstrate that organisations that still rely on manual and direct forecasting …

Explaining Deep Q-Learning Experience Replay With Shapley Additive Explanations, Robert S. Sullivan

Dissertations

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in optimizing complex control and decision-making processes but Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) lacks interpretability, limiting its adoption in regulated sectors like manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. Difficulties arise from DRL’s opaque decision-making, hindering efficiency and resource use, this issue is amplified with every advancement. While many seek to move from Experience Replay to A3C, the latter demands more resources. Despite efforts to improve Experience Replay selection strategies, there is a tendency to keep capacity high. This dissertation investigates training a Deep Convolutional Q-learning agent across 20 Atari games, in solving a control task, physics task, …

The Use Of Data Balancing Algorithms To Correct For The Under-Representation Of Female Patients In A Cardiovascular Dataset, Sian Miller

Dissertations

Given that women are under-represented in medical datasets, and that machine learning classification algorithms are known to exhibit bias towards the majority class, the growing application of machine learning in the medical field risks resulting in worse medical outcomes for female patients. The Heart Failure Prediction (HFP) dataset is a historical dataset used for the training of models for the prediction of heart disease. This dataset contains significantly fewer female patients than male patients, and as such it is expected that models trained using this data will inherit a gender bias to favour male patients. This dissertation explores the use …

Probability Expressions In Ai Decision Support: Impacts On Human+Ai Team Performance, Elias Spinn

Dissertations

AI decision support systems aim to assist people in highly complex and consequential domains to make efficient, effective, and high-quality decisions. AI alone cannot be guaranteed to be correct in these complex decision tasks, and a human is often needed to ensure decision accuracy. The ambition is for these human+ AI teams to perform better together than either would individually. To realise this, decision makers must trust their AI partners appropriately, knowing when to rely on their recommendations and when to be sceptical. However, research has shown that decision makers often either mistrust and underutilise these systems, or trust them …

Modelling And Mitigating Interlocutor Confusion In Situated Human-Avatar And Human-Robot Interaction, Na Li

Dissertations

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is an important but challenging field focused on improving the interaction between humans and robots, to make the interaction more intelligent and effective. However, building a natural conversational HRI is an interdisciplinary challenge for scholars, engineers, and designers. Achieving successful conversational interaction with a social robot necessitates not only observing a user’s active participation in the interaction but also being aware of their emotional and attitudinal states as the interaction progresses. On the topic of attitudinal states, one field that has received little attention to date is monitoring the user for possible confusion states. Confusion is a …

Shallow Subsurface Seismic Velocity And Event Location At The Apollo 17 Landing Site, Deanna Phillips

Dissertations

The origins of thermal moonquakes reveal insight into the evolution of the lunar surface through cyclic thermal stresses. While thermal moonquakes were observed during the passive Apollo 17 Lunar Seismic Profiling Experiment (LSPE), they have never conclusively been located. Using a shallow surface velocity model, thermal moonquakes can be located by minimizing the residual between the observed and theoretical travel times. The purpose of this study is to determine the source mechanism of thermal moonquakes to understand cyclic thermal stresses impacting lunar boulder breakdown. This study develops a location algorithm and explores the affects of various shallow surface velocity models. …

Regulation Of Rare Genetic Variation In Human Disease, Carter Wright

Dissertations

Genomic technologies are used to analyze genetic information. The work described focused on multiple sequencing applications to evaluate the impact of genetic variation in patients with disease. Whole genome sequencing, RNA-sequencing, and ChIP-sequencing were performed to identify variants, understand gene expression, and determine the differences in chromatin structure that contribute to cellular and organismal phenotypes. My thesis work describes the use of computational tools to analyze genomic data with the goal of understanding acquired genetic and epigenetic variation in cancer as well as inherited variation associated with rare neurological disease. Whole genome sequencing yielded a diagnostic rate of 53 percent …

Design And Synthesis Of Earth Abundant Transition Metal Catalysts For Selective Oxidation Of Light Alkanes And Olefins, Muntaseer Bunian

Dissertations

Production of value-added chemicals by way of selective oxidation of hydrocarbons presents a prospect of establishing a new process that is sustainable and capable of providing an optimum product yield at a lower cost. Selective oxidation reactions involve hydrogen abstraction from appropriate sites from the hydrocarbons and insertion of oxygen while ensuring a stop at partial oxidation product without further oxidation and thus maximizing the production of the desired products. Earth-abundant transition metals, such as Fe and Ni, can be selective and active in such reactions when synthesized with specific structures. In Chapter 3, we primarily focus on identifying the …

Contributions To Data Compression Research For Various Media Formats Using Particle Swarm Optimization And Neural Networks, Reetu Hooda

Dissertations

Advancement in high resolution devices used to capture images and videos has put strain on data storage and transmission. For their practical usage, efficient data compression techniques becomes essential. In this context, we conducted a study on compression of two media formats, including ROI maps of hyperspectral images, and 3D point clouds. For lossless compression of ROI maps, we proposed novel schemes that can achieve high compression ratios by partitioning the intricate regions of the image into smaller blocks. Our analysis of a linear predictive model applied on the original images showed that the resulting residual images tend to have …

Understanding The Sequence Specificity Of Ribosome Arresting Peptides, Heather Nicole Gentle

Dissertations

Regulatory arrest peptides (RAPs) fine-tune gene expression based on physiological cues from internal and external environments. These peptides, generated from upstream open reading frames in bacteria and eukaryotes, function by conditionally arresting the ribosome to control the fate of associated messenger RNAs (mRNA). Commonly, RAPs contain two functional domains composed of conserved residues that are critical for ribosome arrest called the sensor and stalling domains. The sensor domain allows the peptide to monitor outside or within the ribosome for its inducer molecule by folding into secondary structures that produce a binding site. The stalling domain slows the rate of translation …

Analysis Of Cryptic Variation Affecting Splicing In Early-Onset Mendelian Disease, Stephanie A. Felker

Dissertations

Genetic variants with poor annotation or unknown biological consequence are often systematically excluded in genomic analysis. Here I analyze variants near "poison exons” which are often absent from standard gene annotations and are alternative exons whose inclusion results in a premature termination codon. Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) often result from rare genetic variation, but the genomic testing yield for NDDs remains around 50%, suggesting some clinically relevant rare variants may be missed by standard analyses. Variants that alter poison exons inclusion can lead to loss-of-function and may be highly penetrant contributors to disease. I analyzed variants found by genome sequencing in …

Effects Of Pressure Side Film Cooling Hole Placement And Configuration On Surface Heat Transfer Characteristics Of A Transonic Turbine Squealer Blade Tip, Hallie Collopy

Dissertations

Investigated are the effects of pressure side film cooling hole placement and configuration on the surface heat transfer characteristics of a transonic turbine squealer blade tip. Eight different blade tip arrangements are investigated, which are denoted C1, C2, C3, B1, B2, B3, B4, and 8D. Data are provided which include spatially-resolved and line-averaged distributions of heat transfer coefficient ratio and adiabatic film cooling effectiveness. The SS/TS/WT (supersonic/transonic/wind tunnel) blow down facility is employed with a transonic test section containing a five blade linear cascade. Spatially-resolved surface heat transfer characteristics are measured using transient infrared thermography, and an impulse response transient …

Understanding Advanced Practice Providers' Personal Factors That Influence Evaluating And Referring For Sleep Disorders In Pediatric And Adolescent Young Adult Cancer Survivors, Lindsay R. Melson

Dissertations

Pediatric and adolescent young adult (AYA) cancer survivors disproportionately experience sleep disorders compared to healthy peers. This dissertation examines the facilitators and barriers that influence advanced practice providers' (APPs) ability to evaluate and refer pediatric/AYA hematology oncology cancer survivors to sleep specialists. The first manuscript provides an integrative review of APPs' behaviors in screening for sleep disorders in pediatric/AYA cancer survivors using the Social Cognitive Theory as a guide. The second manuscript defines the concept of sleep disorders in pediatric cancer survivors using the Walker and Avant method. The third manuscript provides a qualitative analysis from interviews with hematology/oncology (heme/onc) …

A High-Speed Simulation And Cybersecurity Regression Testing Platform For Industrial Control Systems, Shelton Wright

Dissertations

Modeling and simulation techniques are used extensively in both industry and science. Individual parts of larger systems are typically modeled and simulated using different techniques and tools making it difficult to study the more extensively coupled heterogeneous system. In order to show the vulnerabilities of a physical system to cybersecurity risks, the complex interdependence between the cyber and physical systems must be modeled. This paper discusses the development of a high-speed high-fidelity Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) simulation platform that 1) enables regression testing of both cybersecurity applications and other SCADA applications and 2) enables the creation of data …

Bayesian Methods For Time-Delay Interferometry In Space-Based Detection Of Gravitational Waves, Jessica Page

Dissertations

Gravitational wave (GW) data analysis often necessarily includes limiting assumptions about detector noise and its response function during astrophysical parameter estimation. Here we take a broad look at the impact these assumptions can have across the GW spectrum, with an emphasis on Bayesian techniques for the future space-based Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. Laser frequency noise (LFN) will be the dominant source of noise in the LISA mission at ~7 orders of magnitude greater amplitude than typical GWs. Time-delay interferometry (TDI) is the method for suppressing LFN to acceptable levels by linearly combining time-shifted measurements to digitally represent an …

The Influence Of Irrigation On Great Plains Diurnal Circulations And Boundary Layer Convective Rolls, Christopher E. Phillips

Dissertations

Agriculture is the most substantial change to the natural land surface made by humans, and irrigation plays a crucial role. Irrigation is utilized for 20% of croplands, and those regions produce 40% of the global food supply. The Great Plains Irrigation Experiment (GRAINEX) deployed to southeast Nebraska during the summer of 2018 to investigate the effects of irrigation on the atmosphere. This dissertation utilizes those observations in conjunction with numerical modeling to determine how irrigation modifies the Great Plains slope wind. Analysis of rawinsondes indicate that irrigation present in upslope regions of the domain weakens the slope wind circulation and …