Digital Commons Network^™

Development And Formative Implementation Of A Nutrition Assessment And Peer Education Program Based On Dietary Analysis At A California State University, Janay Jelso

Master's Theses

A healthy diet has been established as a key component contributing to an individual’s quality of life. Statistics show that the diet of Americans needs improvement (Guenther et al., 2007) indicating possible lack knowledge of what healthy eating behaviors are. There is an abundance of nutrition misinformation available to the consumer (American Dietetic Association, 2002a). Dietary interventions that provide credible education based on readiness to change behaviors and goal setting have been successful in increasing awareness of what healthy eating behaviors are and changing existing behaviors over time (Ammerman et al., 2002; Evans & Sawyer-Morse, 2002; Gambera et al., 1995; …

Effect Of Water On Micronutrient Content And Yield In Rice (Oryza Sativa L.), Sheila Lorraine Baker

Master's Theses

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is an important crop in many countries. According to the IRRI, more than 2 billion people globally depend on rice as a staple food (Dawe, et al. 2003). Studies on micronutrient content in rice and the effect of water in availability of the nutrients may aid in decreasing global nutrient deficiencies. Rice is grown under different water regimes such as AWD and intermittent flooding, sprinkler and furrow irrigation. A greenhouse pot experiment of rice utilizing a split plot design under different water regimes was conducted to assess the affect of water on (1) DTPA extractable soil …

A Pdms Sample Pretreatment Device For The Optimization Of Electrokinetic Manipulations Of Blood Serum, Timothy J. Abram

Master's Theses

This project encompasses the design of a pretreatment protocol for blood serum and adaption of that protocol to a microfluidic environment in order to optimize key sample characteristics, namely pH, conductivity, and viscosity, to enable on-chip electrokinetic separations. The two major parts of this project include (1) designing a pretreatment protocol to optimize key parameters of the sample solution within a target range and (2) designing /fabricating a microchip that will effectively combine the sample solution with the appropriate buffers to replicate the same bench-scale protocol on the micro-scale.

Biomarker detection in complex samples such as blood necessitates appropriate sample …

Development Of A Low Cost Handheld Microfluidic Phosphate Colorimeter For Water Quality Analysis, Sean C. Kaylor

Master's Theses

This thesis describes the design, fabrication, and testing process for a microfluidic phosphate colorimeter utilized for water quality analysis. The device can be powered by, and interfaced for data collection with, a common cell phone or laptop to dramatically reduce costs. Unlike commercially available colorimeters, this device does not require the user to measure or mix sample and reagent. A disposable poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) microfluid chip, powered by an absorption pumping mechanism, was used to draw water samples, mix the sample at a specific ratio with a molybdovanadate reagent, and load both fluids into an onboard cuvette for colorimetric analysis. A …

Development Of A High Performance Micropropulsion System For Cubesats, Christopher Lorian Biddy

Master's Theses

Picosatellites are defined as satellites with a mass between 0.1 and 1kg (Miniaturized satellite). Picosatellites are typically designed to work together or function in formations (Miniaturized satellite). A specific type of Picosatellite known as CubeSats were introduced in 1999 and since then have increased in popularity so that there are now over 80 CubeSat programs around the world. CubeSats are defined as cubic units 10cm on each side and no more than 1kg in mass. CubeSats are required to conform to the CubeSat Standard created by California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University and be compatible with Cal Poly’s P-POD …

Metamorphism And Putative Bioalteration Of Basaltic Glass : Coast Range Ophiolite, Cynthia E. Schultz

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Performance Analysis And Life Prediction For Small Wind Turbine Blades: A Wood Laminate Case Study, Christopher James Nosti

Master's Theses

A detailed study of the fatigue life of wooden wind turbine blades for a new 10 kilowatt system was undertaken. A numerical model of the blades was created using the technical software package MATLAB in order to estimate the maximum stress occurring within the blade in response to changes in wind velocities based on a wind profile approximating the location where these turbines are expected to operate. The material properties of the wooden laminate were measured using an Instron tensile test machine and were found to be in line with published values. In parallel with this effort, a three dimensional …

On-Board Orbit Determination And 3-Axis Attitude Determination For Picosatellite Applications, John Arthur Bowen

Master's Theses

This thesis outlines an orbit determination and 3-axis attitude determination system for use on orbit as applicable to 1U CubeSats and other picosatellites. The constraints imposed by the CubeSat form factor led to the need for a simple configuration and relaxed accuracy requirements. To design a system within the tight mass, volume, and power constraints inherent to CubeSats, a balance between hardware complexity, software complexity and accuracy is sought. The proposed solution consists of a simple orbit propagator, magnetometers with a magnetic field look-up table, Sun sensors with an analytic Sun direction model, and the TRIAD method to combine vector …

Facility Power Usage Prediction With Artificial Neural Networks, Sunny Wan

Master's Theses

Residential and commercial buildings accounted for about 68% of the total U.S. electricity consumption in 2002. Improving the energy efficiency of buildings can save energy, reduce cost, and protect the global environment.

In this research, artificial neural network is employed to model and predict the facility power usage of campus buildings. The prediction is based on the building and the weather conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. Various neural network configurations are discussed; satisfactory computer simulation results are obtained and presented.

Feeding Phishers, Nicholas J. Lynch

Master's Theses

Phishing campaigns continue to deceive users into revealing their credentials, despite advancing spam filters, browser and toolbar warnings, and educational efforts. Recently, researchers have begun investigating how fake credentials --- or honeytokens --- can be used to detect phishing sites and protect users. BogusBiter, one such work, creates sets of honeytokens based on users' real credentials and sends them alongside real user submissions to phishing sites. In this paper, we present Phish Feeder, an anti-phishing tool which extends the BogusBiter honeytoken generation algorithm in order to create more realistic and authentic-looking credentials. Phish Feeder also employs a ``honeytoken repository'' which …

Robust Unconstrained Face Detection And Lip Localization Using Gabor Filters, Robert E. Hursig

Master's Theses

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a well-researched field of study aimed at augmenting the man-machine interface through interpretation of the spoken word. From in-car voice recognition systems to automated telephone directories, automatic speech recognition technology is becoming increasingly abundant in today’s technological world. Nonetheless, traditional audio-only ASR system performance degrades when employed in noisy environments such as moving vehicles. To improve system performance under these conditions, visual speech information can be incorporated into the ASR system, yielding what is known as audio-video speech recognition (AVASR). A majority of AVASR research focuses on lip parameters extraction within controlled environments, but these …

The Effect Of Particle Surface Area To Volume Ratio On Ion Release From Cocr Spheres, Darin J. Grandfield

Master's Theses

In 2005, over 200,000 Americans underwent a hip arthroplasty, the replacement of a hip joint with an artificial prosthesis. Of these arthroplasties, metal-on-metal type implants represent an increasing usage percentage. Metal-on-metal implants are selected largely for their low volumetric wear rate, durability, and resistance to corrosion. In spite of these advantages, little is known concerning the long-term consequences of heavy metal alloy use in the body, although early research indicates potentially carcinogenic results. This thesis is a preliminary investigation into these long term effects and their root causes.

An improved comprehension of the corrosion kinetics and the rate of ion …

Evaluating The Electrical Response Of Polyaniline To Mechanical Strain, Matthew L. Goebel

Master's Theses

This thesis focuses on the electrical output of polyaniline films subjected to uniaxial strain in hydrochloric acid solutions. Polyaniline belongs to novel class of materials known as conducting polymers. Alternating single and double bonds in the backbone of conducting polymers allow them to transmit electric charge when they are doped with negatively charged ions. Modifying the degree of doping and other electrical/chemical treatments allow conducting polymers to exhibit conducting, semi-conducting, or insulating electrical properties. Resilient mechanical properties, good processability, and low cost make conducting polymers good candidates for applications traditionally held by metals and semi-conductors.

When tensile strain is applied …

Carbon Fiber Leaf Springs For Adaptive Cross Country Skiing, William Drew Atkinson

Master's Theses

This work describes the development of a custom sit ski for US Ski Team paralympian Greg Mallory from concept through prototype fabrication. The ski consists of a custom seat molded specifically for the athlete, carbon fiber leaf springs, and a custom binding attachment system compatible with NNN style cross country bindings. The sit ski is designed to maximize poling power through the use of an upright rather than reclined seating position, allowing for increased utilization of core muscle strength. The springs were designed based on information gathered by a custom National Instruments data acquisition system, and stiffness analysis was conducted …

Mount San Jacinto State Park Visitor Attributes, Preferences, And Perceptions, Katherine Elizabeth Wassenberg

Master's Theses

The purpose of the study was to assess Mount San Jacinto State Park visitor attributes, visit attributes, preferences, and perceptions. Visitor surveys were conducted at two predetermined points within Mount San Jacinto State Park Wilderness Area, the entrance to Long Valley and adjacent to the Long Valley Ranger Station, during summer 2008. Three hundred and seventy-eight subjects completed one of the two visitor surveys (97.68% response rate), 256 (67.7%) completed the Long Valley Survey and 122 (32.3%) completed the Wilderness Survey. The subjects were mostly male, married, from California, and White or Latino/Hispanic. The average age was 45 years old …

Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging Simulated In Matlab, Matthew Schlutz

Master's Theses

This thesis further develops a method from ongoing thesis projects with the goal of generating images using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulations coded in MATLAB. The project is supervised by Dr. John Saghri and sponsored by Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems. SAR is a type of imaging radar in which the relative movement of the antenna with respect to the target is utilized. Through the simultaneous processing of the radar reflections over the movement of the antenna via the range Doppler algorithm (RDA), the superior resolution of a theoretical wider antenna, termed synthetic aperture, is obtained. The long term goal …

Store And Forward Routing For Sparse Pico-Satellite Sensor Networks With Data-Mules, Trevor Joseph Koritza

Master's Theses

Satellites are playing an increasingly important role in collecting scientific information, providing communication services, and revolutionizing navigation. Until recently satellites were large and very expensive, creating a high barrier to entry that only large corporations and government agencies could overcome. In the past few years the CubeSat project at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) has worked to refine the design and launching of small, lightweight, and less expensive satellites called pico-satellites, opening space up to a wider audience. Now that Cal Poly has the launch logistics and hardware under control, a new problem has arisen. These …

Attitude Determination Of A Student Satellite Using On-Orbit Magnetometer And Temperature Data, Jacob Daniel Dimiceli

Master's Theses

An extended Kalman filter is modified to support only magnetometer data as a measurement for spacecraft attitude information. Actual on-orbit data from a student satellite is used in the filter from three different time periods and varying data frequencies. The extended Kalman filter has a thermal model that utilizes external temperature data as a verification tool for filter convergence and for parameter tuning. It can capture the frequency of temperature changes and the correct side panel being lit by the sun as long as the filter converges properly, but not the magnitude of the temperature at a specific time. A …

Substituting Residential Rainwater Harvesting And Greywater Reuse For Public Water Supply: Tools For Evaluating The Public Cost, Jennifer L. Ferguson

Master's Theses

The intent of this project is to provide tools for public administrators to implement and evaluate the cost of an alternative on-site residential water supply using rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse in their jurisdiction. These tools are then applied to the city of San Luis Obispo (SLO), California as a case study to demonstrate how rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse could be implemented to supply all residential potable and non-potable water needs, completely replacing the current centralized publicly-managed water system. Further, energy and direct fiscal costs of the alternative system are compared with the current system. A cost analysis is …

Do Canines Experience The Effects Of Heart Rate Turbulence?, Melanie Ann Gurunathan

Master's Theses

Background

The canine cardiac system has been the model against which many Class III cardiac devices are validated. Thus, it is expected that the canine heart has very similar electrical model to that found in humans. In 1999, the absence of Heart Rate Turbulence (HRT) after a single Pre-Ventricular Contraction (PVC) was linked to high-risk patient after acute myocardial infarction. Studies of HRT were performed on high-risk patients with Holter-Monitors as were most subsequent HRT studies. If HRT could potentially be used as a risk factor of heart disease, it is interesting to study whether HRT is present following a …

A System For Natural Language Unmarked Clausal Transformations In Text-To-Text Applications, Daniel Miller

Master's Theses

A system is proposed which separates clauses from complex sentences into simpler stand-alone sentences. This is useful as an initial step on raw text, where the resulting processed text may be fed into text-to-text applications such as Automatic Summarization, Question Answering, and Machine Translation, where complex sentences are difficult to process. Grammatical natural language transformations provide a possible method to simplify complex sentences to enhance the results of text-to-text applications. Using shallow parsing, this system improves the performance of existing systems to identify and separate marked and unmarked embedded clauses in complex sentence structure resulting in syntactically simplified source for …

Does Student Leadership Participation Enhance The Development Of Emotional Intelligence, Michelle Breanne Curro

Master's Theses

Emotional Intelligence is believed to explain how emotions may be used, monitored, and measured to predict workplace success and failure, the suggestion that if individuals can balance the emotions within themselves and others, they can use their skills to better their organization. This study explored the development of Emotional Intelligence in the ASI Student Manager Team in comparison to Student Government members at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) during the fall 2008 quarter. The Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) was used to assess student leaders’ Emotional Intelligence (EI) development (N = 27). A two sample t-test …

A Study Of Dempster-Shafer's Theory Of Evidence In Comparison To Classical Probability Combination, Scott J. Seims

Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

A Study of Dempster-Shafer’s Theory of Evidence in Comparison to Classical Probability Combination

Scott J. Seims

This thesis is an assessment on the effectiveness of Dempster-Shafer’s Theory of Evidence in comparison to Classical Probabilistic Combination as it applies to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR). A three feature based classifier (peaks, corners and edges) ATR system is presented. These classifiers are assumed to be independent. The results of both the weight-based Maximum Likelihood and Dempster-Shafer’s Theory of Evidence data fusion techniques are presented.

Using Dempster-Shafer an accuracy of 77.50 percent is obtained, which is less than the …

General Direction Routing Protocol, Sean Michael Lydon

Master's Theses

The General Direction Routing Protocol (GDRP) is a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

multi-path routing protocol which abstracts localization information (commonly GPS

coordinates) into relative direction information in order to perform routing decisions. By

generating relative direction information GDRP is able to operate with fewer precision

requirements than other protocols. This abstraction also allows the integration of other emerging

hardware-based localization techniques, for example, Beamforming Sensor Arrays.

GDRP does not specifically address the next hop a packet should take, but instead specifies a

direction it should travel. This direction abstraction allows for multiple paths to be taken through

the network thus …

Affine Region Tracking And Augmentation Using Mser And Adaptive Sift Model Generation, Matthew James Marano

Master's Theses

Relatively complex Augmented Reality (AR) algorithms are becoming widely available due to advancements in affordable mobile computer hardware. To take advantage of this a new method is developed for tracking 2D regions without a prior knowledge of an environment and without developing a computationally expensive world model. In the method of this paper, affinely invariant planar regions in a scene are found using the Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) detector. A region is selected by the user to define a search space, and then the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is used to detect affine invariant keypoints in the region. …

Boundless Fluids Using The Lattice-Boltzmann Method, Kyle J. Haughey

Master's Theses

Computer-generated imagery is ubiquitous in today's society, appearing in advertisements, video games, and computer-animated movies among other places. Much of this imagery needs to be as realistic as possible, and animators have turned to techniques such as fluid simulation to create scenes involving substances like smoke, fire, and water. The Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) is one fluid simulation technique that has gained recent popularity due to its relatively simple basic algorithm and the ease with which it can be distributed across multiple processors. Unfortunately, current LBM simulations also suffer from high memory usage and restrict free surface fluids to domains of …

Time-Frequency Analysis Of Intracardiac Electrogram, Erik Brockman

Master's Theses

The Cardiac Rhythm Management Division of St. Jude Medical specializes in the development of implantable cardioverter defibrillators that improve the quality of life for patients diagnosed with a variety of cardiac arrhythmias, especially for patients prone to sudden cardiac death. With the goal to improve detection of cardiac arrhythmias, this study explored the value in time-frequency analysis of intracardiac electrogram in four steps. The first two steps characterized, in the frequency domain, the waveforms that construct the cardiac cycle. The third step developed a new algorithm that putatively provides the least computationally expensive way to identifying cardiac waveforms in the …

Hyperspectral Image Compression Using A Two-Stage Klt, Seton S. Schroeder

Master's Theses

A computationally efficient, lossy, bandwidth compression scheme for hyperspectral imagery is presented. In certain cases, the direct application of the standard KLT algorithm over an entire data set is not practical. The data may be too large for efficient processing by one encoder and so portions of the entire data set may necessarily be sampled by different encoders. The algorithm proposed handles such a limitation by leveraging the standard JPEG 2000 technology. The component decorrelation of the JPEG 2000 (extension 2) is replaced with a two-stage Karhunen-Loeve Transformation (KLT) operation resulting in a reduction in the computational complexity. At the …

Non-Linear Contact Analysis Of Meshing Gears, Chun Hung Lee

Master's Theses

Gear transmission systems are considered one of the critical aspects of vibration analysis, and it contains various potential faults such as misalignment, cracks, and noise. Therefore, it requires vibration monitoring to ensure the system is operating properly. Case mounted accelerometers are frequently used to monitor frequencies in a system. However, it is not a simple task to identify and interpret the acceleration data since there are many gear mesh frequencies present. One of the approaches utilized by researchers to perform gear diagnostic is Finite Element Modeling. This study focuses on stiffness cycle and meshing stiffness of non-linear quasi-static finite element …

Design Evaluation Of An Anaerobic Chamber Prototype, Anthony M. Kendig

Master's Theses

Within the field of microbiology there is a group of bacteria termed, anaerobic, because of their aversion to oxygen. Clinical and industrial interest in these bacteria has made the use of anaerobic systems necessary for widespread testing and research. The glove-less anaerobic chamber has become the premier method for successful cultivation of anaerobic isolates. A prototype anaerobic chamber design contains new features and different anaerobic techniques formed around additional specifications given by microbiologists. Through testing and discussion of the anaerobic systems of this prototype, the design is evaluated based on its anaerobic performance. The three chamber systems that maintain the …