Digital Commons Network^™

Nutrient Cycling Along Microbial And Lithologic Gradients And Fostering Student Self-Confidence In Science, Kiley Remiszewski

Doctoral Dissertations

Increased understanding of the impact of biology on weathering rates and its response to environmental factors will lead to more accurate global models and enhanced management practices to optimize productive, healthy forests. Although biological contributions to weathering are established in the literature, more data to translate these observations for implementation in a predictive framework should be obtained (e.g. Taylor et al., 2012). Mycorrhizal fungi have implications for global carbon cycling and increasing carbon storage in soils (Soudzilovskaia et al., 2019) but the extent of their impact is still an area of active research with more studies of local weathering sites …

Exclusive Phi Production Beam Spin Asymmetry Measurements With Clas12, Brandon Clary

Doctoral Dissertations

Measurements of the beam spin asymmetry (BSA) of the exclusive electroproduction of the vector phi(1020) meson through its decay into charged Kaons have been performed. The data set used was based on the RG-A run period from the recently upgraded CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS12) in Hall B at Jefferson National Lab (JLab). The run period used a 10.6 GeV longitudinally polarized electron beam and an unpolarized hydrogen target. The available statistics collected allow for detailed studies of the W, -t, xB, and Q2 dependencies of the BSA amplitudes from phi production. The BSA measurements will shed light on the …

Homomesy For Foatic Actions On The Symmetric Group, Elizabeth Sheridan-Rossi

Doctoral Dissertations

In this thesis, we consider two different families of maps on the symmetric group S_n, each created by intertwining a bijection of Foata with dihedral involutions on permutation matrices. Iterating each map creates a cyclic action on S_n, partitioning it into orbits. This allows us to look at statistics that have the same average value over each orbit, called homomesic. The homomesy phenomenon was first proposed by Propp and Roby in 2011, and many instances have been found across a wide range of combinatorial objects and maps.

The first family of maps involves the so-called “fundamental …

Resolvent Estimates And Discrete Maximal Parabolic Regularity For Galerkin Finite Element Methods, Kyle Allaire

Doctoral Dissertations

We study space-time fully discrete maximal parabolic regularity for second order advection-diffusion operators. These estimates have many applications, including in the establishment of optimal a priori estimates in non Hilbert space norms. For time discretization, we use discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods that, in the simplest case of piecewise constant approximating functions, are equivalent to a modified backwards Euler time-stepping scheme. For discretization of the spatial variable, we analyze both continuous Galerkin (cG) and discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods (dG). Discontinuous Galerkin methods in space are analyzed because of our particular interest in the case where advection dominates diffusion, where …

Applications Of Random Effects In Dependent Compound Risk Models, Himchan Jeong

Doctoral Dissertations

In the ratemaking for general insurance, calculation of the pure premium has traditionally been based on modeling frequency and severity separately. It has also been a standard practice to assume, for simplicity, the independence of loss frequency and loss severity. However, in recent years, there is a sporadic interest in the actuarial literature and practice to explore models that depart from this independence assumption. Besides, because of the short-term nature of many lines of general insurance, the availability of data enables us to explore the benefits of using random effects for predicting insurance claims observed longitudinally, or over a period …

Shadow Detection And Classification In High-Resolution Aerial Imagery, Qian Lei

Doctoral Dissertations

High-resolution imagery is becoming increasingly available for use in land-cover mapping; however, previous studies have found that urban shadows cast by elevated features in urban environments can cause substantial errors in land-cover classifications. Detecting and restoring land-cover information within urban shadows can help improve accuracy in land-cover mapping. Although a considerable number of studies have been conducted on both shadow detection and shadow restoration, few studies have focused on a complete urban shadow correction workflow that combines shadow detection and restoration for the purpose of land-cover mapping using high-resolution aerial imagery across large geographic extents s. Thus, the goal of …

Rectifiability Of Pointwise Doubling Measures In Hilbert Space, Lisa Naples

Doctoral Dissertations

In geometric measure theory, there is interest in understanding the interactions of measures with rectifiable sets. Here, we study such interactions in three settings. First, we extend a theorem of Badger and Schul in Euclidean space to characterize rectifiable pointwise doubling measures in Hilbert space. Given a measure, we construct a multiresolution family of windows, and then we use a weighted Jones’ function to record how well lines approximate the distribution of mass in each window. We show that when the measure is rectifiable, the mass is sufficiently concentrated around a line at each scale and that the converse also …

Should I Stay Or Should I Go? Talker-Specific Influences On Distributional Learning For Speech, Nicholas Monto

Doctoral Dissertations

There is no one-to-one mapping between speech acoustics and individual speech sounds. The acoustic cues produced for individual speech sounds show wide variability both within and across talkers. Nonetheless, listeners perceive the speech of familiar and novel talkers with ease. It is theorized that listeners achieve this by maintaining a degree of flexibility in how acoustics are mapped to speech sound categories. Building on previous work demonstrating that listeners are sensitive to individual talker differences in speech production, we test the hypothesis that distributional learning for input statistics is contextually governed by talker identity. Listeners (n = 320) completed two …

Wombling For Spatial And Spatiotemporal Processes: Applications To Insurance Data, Aritra Halder

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation we focus on developing a framework for detecting zones of rapid change within a surface that is spatially or spatiotemporally indexed, which is termed as wombling. This is considered under two different approaches featuring a semi-parametric model and a model based parametric setup. The second approach starts with a Gaussian process specification on the spatial or spatiotemporal component. We focus on applying the developed framework to build models for analyzing spatiotemporally referenced insurance data arising from losses due to automobile collision in the state of Connecticut, in the year 2008. For the semi-parametric models we adopt a …

Temporal Modeling Frameworks For Coastal Wave Heights, Ellis Shaffer

Doctoral Dissertations

Current marine science methods for modeling wave data typically assume that wave height distributions belong to limited class within the exponential family. Alternatively, models emphasize physics principles over statistical methods. In this dissertation, we investigate the predictive power of wave height histories as well as exogenous predictors. We develop binary time series models for wave height over a threshold in both frequentist and Bayesian frameworks. Within the Bayesian framework, we fit Dynamic Generalized Linear Models (DGLM) using Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations and demonstrate advantages over classical methods. We further investigate the quantiles and expectiles of the continuous- valued wave height …

Flux Partitioning And Reconstruction Methods For Atmosphere-Ocean Interaction, Robert D. Dolan

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis investigates methods of coupling fluids across an interface, motivated by air-sea interaction in application codes. The algorithms investigated here have two primary classifications: sequential and concurrent, in reference to different code configurations for the air and sea modules on parallel computing systems. In the sequential mode, the modules run on the same set of processors. The air module is run first since atmospheric dynamics are thought of as driving ocean surface conditions. In the concurrent mode, the modules run simultaneously, in parallel, on different sets of processors. Different step sizes are allowed for the two fluid codes.

The …

A Normative Classification Of Consumer Big Data, Anuashine Chefor Ellis

Doctoral Dissertations

The big data phenomenon has transformed every area of life and business. Businesses today rely on the volume, velocity, and variety (3Vs) of data available today in product design, advertisement, sales, and post-sale follow up activities. Communication between the firm and the consumer is personalized using data collected on the consumer to match the consumer’s location, time, and needs. Some marketers argue that this has birth a new era of marketing; transformative marketing, in which the firm’s ability to deliver value and to acquire and maintain long-run competitive advantage determined by the firm’s data resources. In other words, data are …

Development Of Decision-Support Tools For Improved Utility Response Following Storm Events And Water Treatment Technologies, Tara Walsh

Doctoral Dissertations

Decision-support tools can provide insights to emergency managers when the situation exceeds their past experience. The intensity of extreme storms is increasing, which leads to more widespread damage. This study developed an agent-based model (ABM) to allow emergency managers to model and test the decisions made in storm restoration. The key factor for using an ABM is that managers can assign specific crew behaviors to simulate different strategies to use in restoration. This study covers the development of an ABM and then applies the model to a specific case study of Hurricane Sandy in a climate-enhanced future. The case study …

Influence Of Local Ph Environment And Zn(Ii) On The Structure Of The Antimicrobial Peptide Clavanin A And Its Dynamics With Different Membrane Models In Md Simulations, Searle Aichelle Duay

Doctoral Dissertations

In the latest report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on antimicrobial resistance, this problem remains to be an urgent global threat, infecting about three million people and killing about 36,000 people in the United States annually. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) offer a number of advantages over small molecule antibiotics, such as their structural flexibility in response to different local environments, allowing for having environment-responsive modes of action. In this dissertation, we will focus on Clavanin A (ClavA), an AMP that was identified and can be extracted from the tunicate Styela clava. Experimentally, it was shown that …

Domain-Specific Creativity And Vocational Interests: How Do Creativity And Related Factors Relate To Vocational Interests And Different Latent Riasec Profiles?, Xiaochen Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Creativity has potential as a key element in understanding students’ vocational interests but has yet to be fully studied. Two questions were proposed: (1) Can potential predictors (demographics, academic achievements, domain-general and domain-specific creativity factors, and the interactions between gender and creativity-related factors) significantly predict vocational interests as derived from Holland’s RIASEC Model and (2) do domain-general and domain-specific creativity factors exhibit differential mean levels across distinct latent vocational profiles?

This dissertation drew on a dataset that collected 4,052 valid responses from grade 9 to 12 students who registered American College Testing (ACT) in the United States for the June …

On The Positivity Of The Discrete Green's Function For Unstructured Finite Elements Discretizations In Three Dimensions, Andrew Miller

Doctoral Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, we will establish new estimates for the discrete Green's function and obtain some positivity results. In particular, we establish that the discrete Green's functions with singularity in the interior of the domain cannot be bounded uniformly with respect of the mesh parameter h. Actually, we show that at the singularity the Green's function is of order h^(-1), which is consistent with the behavior of the continuous Green's function. In addition, we also show that the discrete Green's function is positive and decays exponentially away from the singularity. We also establish numerically persistent …

Development Of A School Climate Walkthrough Assessment, Jesslynn Rocha Neves

Doctoral Dissertations

School climate measurement is an increasingly important component of data-driven school improvement efforts. The present study involved the development of the School Climate Walkthrough Assessment (SCWA), a measure for evaluating environmental indicators and oral student reports of school climate alongside the Georgia Elementary School Climate Survey (GESCS), a validated self-report survey of school climate. The SCWA is administered by an adult who rates features of the school environment and then selects a subset of students for a school climate interview. It is meant to provide a snapshot of the general school climate in conjunction with school climate data obtained via …

Engaging Others, Teresa Allen

Doctoral Dissertations

We all have views on controversial issues: gun control, climate change, and abortion, to name a few. Due to the controversial nature of these issues, it can often be difficult to engage with those with whom we disagree. Precisely because of how much these issues matter, however, it is important to figure out whether and how we ought to engage. Aside from moral and political concerns, there are epistemic concerns. For instance, is open-minded engagement always epistemically responsible or required? The purpose of this dissertation is to clarify the role that open-mindedness ought to play in our lives. Given that …

Topics On Asymptotically Hyperbolic Manifolds In General Relativity, Hyun Chul Jang

Doctoral Dissertations

Asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds are natural objects to be considered in certain physical circumstances. This dissertation particularly focuses on construction and rigidity of such manifolds, which includes the following three main results.

Firstly, we obtain a new construction of a 3-dimensional asymptotically hyperbolic manifold from a 2-sphere by using a solution of the Ricci flow as a foliation. These asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds provide examples of `admissible extensions' in the context of an asymptotically hyperbolic analogue of the Bartnik mass.

Secondly, we prove the equality case of the positive mass theorem for asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds without a spin assumption. This is the …

Self-Monitoring With Goal-Setting: Decreasing Disruptive Behavior In Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Kara Mckenna

Doctoral Dissertations

This study sought to investigate the effects of a self-monitoring with goal-setting intervention on students’ disruptive behavior. A multiple baseline A-B-BC design was implemented across five elementary school-aged participants diagnosed with ADHD to examine the use of a behavioral intervention combining self-monitoring and goal-setting techniques to decrease disruptive behavior. The results of this study suggest that self-monitoring with goal-setting appears to be an effective intervention package for decreasing the disruptive behavior of students with ADHD and that these behavioral decreases sustain after intervention completion. Results also suggest moderate benefits of the use of a self-monitoring with goal-setting intervention over a …

Frege's Conception Of Truth As An Object, Junyeol Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I explore Frege’s conception of truth. In particular I defend the thesis that Frege in his mature career takes truth to be an object, i.e., the True qua the reference of true sentences. In the literature on truth Frege has been usually taken to be a truth deflationist or a truth primitivist. Indeed Frege leaves a number of comments that sound like typical deflationist claims and his famous indefinability argument is the most discussed argument for primitivism. However, Frege is neither a deflationist nor a primitivist. His deflationist remarks and the indefinability argument are rather his arguments …

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Investigation Of Conditioned Auditory Percepts, Timothy Michaels

Doctoral Dissertations

The neurobiology of hallucinations is complex, and despite over a century of research it has yet to be fully characterized. The observation that auditory hallucinations occur in healthy individuals may provide new avenues for understanding its neurobiology in psychopathology. Bayesian approaches to perception suggest that aberrant experiences can be conditioned, with stronger effects in those prone to hallucinations. Through a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic resonance spectroscopy, the present study investigated whether differences in the endorsement of conditioned hallucinations was associated with differences in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) glutamate and GABA levels in a healthy, college-aged sample …

Stem Identity Authoring: Intergenerational Collaborative Learning In Informal Stem Programs, Laura Rodriguez

Doctoral Dissertations

The problem this research addresses is the lack of opportunities for many people to develop positive identification with STEM fields (i.e., science, technology, engineering and math). This multiple case study will investigate STEM identity authoring in three intergenerational collaborative learning partnerships in an informal STEM program. Adults and high school teens were paired in two-day workshops to learn conservation science and geospatial technologies with the goal of designing and implementing community conservation projects and further developing their identification with STEM. This research examined how the design and implementation of intergenerational projects provided opportunities for: (1) adults and teens to demonstrate …

Bias Estimation And Coordinate Conversion In 3-D Sensor Measurements, Michael Kowalski

Doctoral Dissertations

In the field of target tracking there are many challenges associated with error in sensor measurements. Sensors can be subject to sources of consistent error such as temperature warping of the physical equipment, environmental effects in the surrounding atmosphere, and internal clock errors. These errors are known as sensor measurement biases. Biases can corrupt many different types of sensor measurements with many different error models. To overcome such error it is necessary to estimate the biases affecting the system. Two primary methods of bias estimation are examined in this work. The first is simultaneous target state and sensor bias estimation, …

Physical Unclonable Functions For Authenticating And Preventing Reverse Engineering Of Integrated Circuits And Electronics Hardware, Md Shahed Enamul Quadir

Doctoral Dissertations

Electronics hardware is subject to a number of potential threats such as reverse engineering and counterfeiting. As a result, hardware authentication mechanisms and anti-reverse engineering techniques such as obfuscation and tamper-resistance are essential. In this thesis, we will present methods to approach these problems, and the primary research contributions of this thesis are a Low pass filter PUF for the authentication of PCBs and ICs; Key generation for hardware obfuscation using strong PUFs; and Session key generation using strong PUF modeling.

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are probabilistic circuit primitives that extract randomness from the physical characteristics of a device. In …

A Bilateral Perspective Of Acquisition Premiums And Post-Acquisition Performance, Sergio Grove

Doctoral Dissertations

In M&As, to acquire the other companies, managers usually pay a premium. In theory, the premium is explained by the market's acknowledgment of a potential increase in value for both firms standing together and coordinating their resources. The problem is that literature usually explains acquisition premium and post-acquisition performance from a one-sided price perspective. To some extent, this one-sided perspective often captures the acquirer's willingness to pay, but it underestimates the two-sided nature of any transaction; the target's perspective is usually omitted. One side sells when they perceive that the value of their asset is lower than the price paid …

Existence Of Localized Pulse Solutions To Skew-Gradient Systems, Jieun Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

Reaction-diffusion systems have been primary tools for studying pattern formation. A skew-gradient system is well known to encompass a class of activator-inhibitor type reaction-diffusion systems that exhibit localized patterns such as fronts and pulses. In this dissertation, we investigate standing pulse solutions to two extensions of FitzHugh-Nagumo system that possess a skew-gradient structure. Our models exhibit additional nonlinearities that may enable the models to capture more complex behavior of standing pulse solutions. In both extensions, we employ a variational approach that involves a nonlocal term and establish the existence of standing pulse solutions with a sign change. In addition, we …

From Patient To Pathways: An Sh2-Based Workflow For Studying Signaling In Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Using Biochemical And Computational Methods, Adam Lafontaine

Doctoral Dissertations

Archival abstract submitted

Modular Functions And Asymptotic Geometry On Punctured Riemann Spheres, Junqing Qian

Doctoral Dissertations

In the first chapter, we derive a precise asymptotic expansion of the complete K\"{a}hler-Einstein metric on the punctured Riemann sphere with three or more omitting points. This new technique is at the intersection of analysis and algebra. By using the Schwarzian derivative, we prove that the coefficients of the expansion are polynomials on the two parameters which are uniquely determined by the omitting points. Furthermore, we use the modular form and Schwarzian derivative to explicitly determine the coefficients in the expansion of the complete K\"{a}hler-Einstein metric for punctured Riemann sphere with $3, 4, 6$ or $12$ omitting points.

The second …

Preservice Mathematics Teachers’ Development Of Open-Mindedness And Cultural Competence During An Education Abroad Program: A Qualitative Case Study, Blair Izard

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a long-standing issue in mathematics education regarding the support of equitable learning outcomes. As there has been significant attention from professional organizations, including NCTM and others, to address issues of access and equity within mathematics education, there has been an emphasis on creating mathematics classrooms that are responsive to students’ backgrounds, experiences, cultural perspectives, and traditions. However, in order to best meet these needs, we must prepare teachers that have a deep understanding of self, society, culture, and equity, which is no small challenge as it’s essentially calling for shifts in mathematics teachers’ identities. Experiential learning, in particular, …