Digital Commons Network^™

The Effects Of Advocate Disclosure On Perceptions Of A Female Child Who Stutters, Peyton Mcknight

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research indicates that people who stutter are frequently attributed with negative stereotypes by listeners as a result of their speech. Previous research has examined the use of self-disclosure in offering the stuttering community a means of acknowledging and sharing the presence of their stuttering with a conversation partner. Subsequently, stuttering self-disclosure has been shown to reduce negative listener perceptions. Select advocate disclosures have also been found to yield beneficial results for a male child who stutters, but the effects of advocate disclosure on perceptions of a female who stutters has remained unexplored. This study expands upon previous research and examines …

Flow Separation In Rotating Channels, Devika Vipul Patel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Direct numerical simulations are carried out to study the flow separation in a channel flow rotating about the spanwise axis. A bump is introduced on one side of the channel by an immersed boundary method. The numerical schemes are studied, the solver is validated, and the computational domain and grid resolution requirements are determined. The characteristics of the separating flow behind the bump are described by comparing the flow at rotation numbers Ro = 0, 0.42, and 1.0. The bulk Reynolds number of the channel is 2,500. Both clockwise and counterclockwise rotations at these two rates are examined. The bump …

Development Of Hollow Vaginal Device Using Stereolithography (Sla) 3d Printing For Intravaginal Drug Delivery, Preethi Lakkala

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vulvovaginal candidiasis is a condition caused by the polymorphic opportunistic fungus Candida albicans, which involves the first-line treatment with antifungal agents comprising azole groups. An intravaginal drug delivery device is an alternate approach to conventional therapy that transcend multiple daily administrations and systemic side effects associated with oral medications and offers effective drug concentrations at the target site for a sustained period. This study reports, for the first time, the development of a novel hollow vaginal device by exploiting stereolithography (SLA) 3D printing technology to achieve localized and extended delivery of Itraconazole. These devices were fabricated using a shape memory …

Scan Stack: A Search-Based Concurrent Stack For Gpu, Noah Brennen South

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Concurrent data structures play a critical role in the overall performance of GPGPU applications. Stack is one of the basic data structures and finds numerous applications where data is processed in a Last In First Out (LIFO) fashion. Although concurrent stack is well researched for multi-core CPUs, there is little research pointing to the conversion of CPU stacks into a GPU-friendly form. In this paper, we propose a concurrent search-based GPU stack named "Scan Stack." The proposed stack is designed to take advantage of GPU memory access patterns, memory coalescence, and thread structures (i.e., warps) to increase throughput. Our experiments …

Down The Stream: The Evolution Of Queer Stream-Of-Consciousness Novels Through The Works Of Virginia Woolf And Ali Smith, Turner Nat Byrd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to understand the evolution of the stream-of-consciousness genre as it applies to, is written by, or centers queer people. Through generous Marxist-feminist readings of the works of Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith—used in this project as exemplars of the genre—it attempts to understand the differences within both the formal and philosophical/political outlook of the two authors. Specifically looking at Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Smith’s Hotel World, The Accidental, and Girl Meets Boy, this project posits that Smith, intentionally or not, has effectively re-written the basic narratives and re-visited the same themes as Woolf, …

Effects Of Stuttering Severity Disclosures On Listener Perceptions Of A Female Adolescent Who Stutters, Mikayla Ryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to measure whether factual self-disclosure statements with differing levels of overt stuttering severity have effect on listener perceptions regarding an adolescent female who stutters (AFWS). Method: A total of 759 adults participated in this study. Participants were gathered through a nationwide campaign to various universities via email. There were four overt severity experimental conditions (control, fluent, mild and moderate-severe); participant assignments were balanced such that each experimental condition had comparable population demographics. Each condition contained a video stimulus of an adolescent female providing a factual disclosure statement identifying herself as a person who …

Fatiguing Effects Of Electrical Stimulation Superimposed Onto Voluntary Contraction, William Matthew Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

BACKGROUND: The current understanding of fatigue is specific to voluntary exercise (VOL) or neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) separately. Currently, there is no data on the understanding of fatigue in VOL+NMES specific to motor control strategies.

PURPOSE: The main purpose of this research project was to compare the fatigability of two exercise conditions (VOL and VOL+NMES) in the elbow flexors and knee extensors.

METHODS: Thirty-six participants aged 18-35 completed this four-visit randomized, controlled study. Visit one included familiarization to procedures. Visits 2-4 included control, VOL, and VOL+NMES fatiguing exercise with the same pre- and post-measurements. Pre-measures included two isometric maximal voluntary …

Dynamic Characterization Of Southern Yellow Pine (Syp) Wood-Based Bio-Composites, Maharshi Dave

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Wood-based bio-composites are becoming increasingly popular due to their low cost, biodegradability, eco-friendliness, relatively robust mechanical properties, and environmental and sustainability benefits. In addition, over 300 million scrap tires are generated in the United States each year. A waste tire rubber aggregate used as supplementary material in wood composites can promote energy absorption and contribute to environmental sustainability. There has been a growing interest in discovering ways to incorporate rubber tire waste into wood-based materials. In this study, micronized rubber powder (MRP) was incorporated into a wood-based bio-composite made of southern yellow pine (SYP) fibers, to determine how it affects …

Progress In Natural Product-Inspired Drug Discovery, Md Imdadul Huque Khan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Natural products and product-derivatized molecules are significant sources for drug discovery and development, and many have been discovered and developed to treat various diseases, including cancer, infectious diseases, neurological disorders, etc. This dissertation reports on the progress of our natural product-inspired research in the discovery of new compounds to treat cancer, infectious diseases, and neuroHIV.

We discovered many glutamine-based compounds and prodrugs that are effective in suppressing the growth of several breast cancer cell lines without introducing cytotoxicity in a non-cancerous cell line. Our lead compound has shown good exposure to the brain, and several compounds were also found to …

"The Wild Asleep": A Cultural And Environmental History Of Ramps, Catherine Jessee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ramps, wild onions, or allium tricoccum are a variety of spring ephemeral, or a flowering plant that emerges for a brief period every spring. In working through stereotypical ideas about Appalachian regional identity, I interpret the environmental history of this plant. Incorporating memory, oral histories, and folklore, this thesis complicates wider conceptions of home, community, and boundary. Tapping into an archive of ramps knowledge as it is created, I ask, what can the future of ramps tell us about place, space, and belonging?

Diversity And Inclusion In Science Teaching Learning (Distl): Focusing On The Perspectives Of Undergraduate Students And Graduate Teaching Assistants In The Chemistry Classroom, Albert Aidoo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) come with a wide range of experiences and educational backgrounds. There is high attrition rate and low academic achievement among students in STEM areas, specifically in college chemistry courses that are prerequisites for many STEM majors. Hence it is important to look at diversity and inclusion specifically in first- and second-year college chemistry courses to address the challenge of student attrition in STEM. Diversity can be understood as the differences each student brings along the dimensions of prior knowledge, skills, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, socio-economic status, age, ability, religious or political …

Using Long Short-Term Memory Networks To Make And Train Neural Network Based Pseudo Random Number Generator, Aditya Harshvardhan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Neural Networks have been used in many decision-making models and been employed in computer vision, and natural language processing. Several works have also used Neural Networks for developing Pseudo-Random Number Generators [2, 4, 5, 7, 8]. However, despite great performance in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) statistical test suite for randomness, they fail to discuss how the complexity of a neural network affects such statistical results. This work introduces: 1) a series of new Long Short- Term Memory Network (LSTM) based and Fully Connected Neural Network (FCNN – baseline [2] + variations) Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNG) …

Assessment Of Aged Woodchip Bioreactor Physical And Hydraulic Properties, Shelby Duncan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Denitrifying woodchip bioreactors are a critical tool for mitigating nitrate loading to downstream water bodies. The properties of the woodchip are a key factor in the design of the bioreactor which are usually designed to optimize that retention time of the water being treated. Retention time is affected by active flow volume, porosity, and flow rate. As a bioreactor ages, the carbon material will break down and, in some cases, sedimentation will occur within the bioreactor. Both processes will affect the porosity and hydraulic performance of the bioreactor. When flow through the bioreactor is significantly different than the original design, …

A Novel Crispr/Cas Gene Editing System For Plants Which Bypasses Genetic Transformation And Tissue Culture, Aastha Acharya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

CRISPR/Cas system is a powerful gene-editing tool that has revolutionized gene editing in many ways. However, the current delivery methods for using CRISPR/Cas system inn plants have some drawbacks that have greatly limited their routine application in plant research and improvement. Specifically,, the methods heavily rely on either genetic transformation for delivering Cas and/or its gRNA coding sequences into the targeted cells or tissue culture, or both for recovering the whole edited plants. To overcome these drawbacks, we have developed a simple, easy to use yet effective system for CRISPR/Cas gene editing in plants that can bypass genetic transformation and …

The Efficacy Of The South Dakota State University Summer Jacks Leap Program, Tessa M. Sundermann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Today, several studies detail the continuing struggle many students have with college mathematics courses at universities across the United States. The South Dakota State University Summer Jacks LeaP program is a summer bridge mathematics program aimed at improving incoming students’ mathematics success. This analysis used a mixed methods research design to examine the efficacy of the Summer Jacks LeaP program. First, we analyzed the LeaP students’ homework averages, exam 1 scores, final exam scores, and overall grade scores to determine if they were finding success in their fall semester mathematics courses. We also used hypothesis testing to compare LeaP participants …

Heuristic Algorithms For Transmission Switching To Reduce Load Shedding, Tanveer Hussain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Design Of Affordable Polyaniline - Based Wearable Sensor For Real Time Plant Growth Monitoring, Temitope Borode

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The need for precision agriculture in today and future farming cannot be overstressed. Recent agriculture is characterized by numerous challenges such as environmental stressors and resource constraints resulting in low crop yield and unsustainable agriculture practices. Understanding plant growth mechanism and growth rate under the external influence is a bedrock towards precision agriculture practices ensuring optimum yield and sustainable utilization of resources. The current study addresses this need by developing and applying an affordable and stable sensor for monitoring plant growth. The sensor was fabricated by in-situ chemical polymerization of aniline on an elastic band substrate by dip coating. The …

Above-Ground Biomass Estimation In Oat Breeding Nurseries Using Uav-Based Multispectral Data, Rakshya Dhakal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Conventional methods of phenotyping for above-ground biomass under field conditions are time consuming, costly, and labor intensive. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) offer a rapid and non-destructive approach for collecting high temporal and spatial resolution imagery of multiple field plots. Vegetation indices (VIs) can be derived from those imagery and have been used broadly for high-throughput biomass estimation, however, they suffer from spectrum saturation issues at high canopy density. In addition, VIs only reflect the canopy spectral information and fail to incorporate the 3-dimensional (3D) canopy structure and architecture information. It also ignores the spatial relationship of pixels to each other …

Optimization Of Electrically Driven Fluid Flow Through Tissue Hydrogels, Joseph C. Walker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

To Study The Factors Influencing The Sampling Variability On Microbiological Analysis Of Milk And Whey, Ratul Kalita

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sampling and analysis are integral parts of dairy processing in quality control, process monitoring and control, and meeting regulatory standards. Accurate sampling is vital to avoid erroneous analysis results and interpretation. The sampling process depends on the appropriateness of sample collection, transportation, storage, and analysis conditions. The bacterial heterogeneity and cluster formation, structural heterogeneity of food, sample unit and size, frequency, and sampling methods, are also crucial in sampling. We aimed to evaluate the influence of sample volume, sampling frequency, and sampling methods in experimental processing lines of whole milk, skim milk, and whey. To standardize the experimental protocols, a …

Relative Radiometric Correction Of Pushbroom Satellites Using The Yaw Maneuver, Christopher Begeman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Earth imaging satellites commonly acquire multispectral imagery using linear array detectors formatted as a pushbroom scanner. Landsat 8, a well-known example, uses pushbroom scanning and thus has 73,000 individual detectors. These 73,000 detectors are split among 14 different focal plane modules (FPM), and each detector and FPM exhibit unique behavior when monitoring a uniform radiance value. To correct for each detectors differences in sensor measurement a novel technique of relative gain estimation that employs an optimized modified Signal-to-Noise Ratio through a 90˚ yaw maneuver, also known as side slither, is presented that allows for both FPM and detector level relative …

Managing Water Quantity And Quality With Subsurface Drainage In Eastern South Dakota, Morghan Hurst

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Moisture extremes (excess and deficit) impact crop loss and water quality. Due to excessively wet springs and dry summers, crop damage can occur within the same county or field within the same year. To determine the magnitude of this problem in eastern South Dakota, indemnified crop insurance data for drought and excessive moisture claims were assessed for the years 1991-2020 for the occurrence of both excess moisture and drought in four counties in eastern South Dakota. Results show that there is greater than a 70% chance of the moisture extremes happening in the same year, making subsurface drainage, controlled drainage, …

Efficient Numerical Optimization For Parallel Dynamic Optimal Power Flow Simulation Using Network Geometry, Rylee Sundermann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this work, we present a parallel method for accelerating the multi-period dynamic optimal power flow (DOPF). Our approach involves a distributed-memory parallelization of DOPF time-steps, use of a newly developed parallel primal-dual interior point method, and an iterative Krylov subspace linear solver with a block-Jacobi preconditioning scheme. The parallel primal-dual interior point method has been implemented and distributed in the open-source PETSc library and is currently available. We present the formulation of the DOPF problem, the developed primal dual interior point method solver, the parallel implementation, and results on various multi-core machines. We demonstrate the effectiveness our proposed block-Jacobi …

Sentiment Without Sentiment Analysis: Using The Recommendation Outcome Of Steam Game Reviews As Sentiment Predictor, Anqi Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents and explores a novel way to determine the sentiment of a Steam game review based on the predicted recommendation of the review, testing different regression models on a combination of Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) features. A dataset of Steam game reviews extracted from the Programming games genre consisting of 21 games along with other significant features such as the number of helpful likes on the recommendation, number of hours played, and others. Based on the features, they are grouped into three datasets: 1) either having keyword features only, 2) keyword features …

Mechanical Property Evaluation Of Additively Manufactured Materials Across A Wide Temperature Range, Sanket Vinayak Hirve

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (also called 3d printing) has transitioned from a prototyping-only technology to a technology that is able to create usable parts with complex geometries. 3D printed parts are beginning to be used across all areas of engineering, such as biomedical, aerospace, automobile and many more. Typically, the term “3D printing” refers to layer by layer deposition of polymer materials, while the term “additive manufacturing” refers to layer by layer metal deposition. Conventional manufacturing, or substrative manufacturing, has several main problems that additive manufacturing can help overcome, such as high cost for low volume production, inability to create very complex …

Project-Based Learning In Non-Traditional Settings In Engineering Education, Mary Foss

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of utilizing the principles of Project-based learning (PJBL) in nontraditional settings in engineering education. There is ample literature related to the usage of PJBL techniques in engineering education but there are also challenges with incorporating PJBL within the curriculum. It is the aim of this dissertation to build upon this understanding of the advantages and limitations of PJBL in engineering education and identify areas within the existing body of knowledge in which more research is needed. This dissertation divides this topic into 4 sub-topics. The first sub-topic explores how PJBL …

Improving Three-Dimensional Instructional Practices Via Professional Development, Alethea Henry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this applied research study was to improve the use of three-dimensional pedagogy in science classes in chronically low-performing schools. The need to build teacher capacity became evident after the state adopted more rigorous science standards revealing deficits in teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. This study utilized two elements, three-dimensional professional development and the science cadre, to build teacher capacity as well as foster collaboration and create buy-in throughout the district among science leaders. Data collected and analyzed from classroom observations, student surveys, and teacher interviews revealed improved usage of three-dimensional instruction and increased buy-in throughout the district to …

Artificial Solid Electrolyte Interface With Superhalogen-Based Double Antiperovskite Li6os(Bh4)2 Materials For Dentrite-Free And Stable Lithium Metal Batteries, Gazi Mahfujul Alam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lithium (Li) metal is regarded as the most propitious anode material for next-generation battery technologies owing to its incredibly high theoritical capacity (3860 mAh g-1) and the most negative electrochemical equilibrium potential (-3.04 V vs standard hydrogen electrode). However, the practical implementation of Li anode in commercial lithium batteries is severely inhibited by the unstable solid liquid interfaces resulting from the ultrahigh reactivity, which leads to dendrite growth, low coulombic efficiency, extreme volume fluctuation, and even safety concerns. For a stable and efficient lithium anode to build next generation Li metal battery, in this thesis, we have tried to solve …

Amphiphilic Janus Polymer Nanoparticles For Pharmaceutical And Biomedical Applications, Mahesh Loku Yaddehige

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Amphiphilic hybrid polymers have attracted significant interest as biomaterials for both fundamental research and practical clinical applications due to their unique polymer structure and properties relative to the conventional symmetric polymers. Often referred to as “Janus” polymers combine two different polymer segments (hydrophilic and hydrophobic) of varying degrees, sizes, and functionalities to obtain a single amphiphilic or hetero-functional macromolecule with characteristic features. In particular, amphiphilic “Janus” polymers and their self-assemblies have shown apparent success in nanomedicine owing to their ability to provide highly ordered nanoscale multimolecular aggregates, including micelles and vesicles. However, engineering these polymeric materials on a large scale …

Halogen Bond Driven Supramolecular Materials, Dilan Chinthaka Karunathilaka

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Halogen bonding (XBing) is a type of non-covalent interaction between covalently bound halogen atoms (XB donor), and Lewis bases (XB acceptor). In recent years, it has become a remarkable and adaptable tool to produce interesting molecular architectures and functionalities in organic-based materials. Such applications include liquid crystals, nonlinear optics, photovoltaics, and multicolor displays in the solid phase. Due to this variety of applications, XBing has become an exciting area of study in supramolecular chemistry. Herein are presented synthetic routes and characterization of self-assembling XBing molecules and their resulting materials. First, four different heterocyclic oligomers containing pyrazine, thiophene, and furan have …