Digital Commons Network^™

Direct Inference Instruction: The Effects On Fourth Grade Students' Reading Comprehension And Motivation, Kalee Bengtson

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Preserving Euskera In A Globalized World: Determining The Long-Term Efficacy Of Multilingual Schools In The Basque Country, Spain, Olivia Destrades Mendoza

Masters Theses

The Basque Country, Spain is a linguistically unique region where the minority indigenous language, Euskera, competes alongside the dominant state language, Castilian, and a lingua franca, English, for prestige and status. Following a history of cultural and linguistic repression and marginalization, the Basque community has, in the past 30 years, begun to reintroduce Euskera into new, multilingual school systems in order to teach, preserve and maintain their heritage language, while simultaneously acquiring English as an important language for global communication. This multimethod, qualitative study takes data from 36 survey respondents and five interview participants from the Basque Country, and triangulates …

Sprouty2 Deficiency In Mice Leads To The Development Of Achalasia, Benjamin Lee Staal

Masters Theses

Sprouty 2 (Spry2), one of the four mammalian Spry family members, is a negative feedback regulator of many receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) signaling including Met. It fine-tunes RTKs signaling through multiple levels of regulations starting from RTK itself to several downstream molecules that are crucial for signal transduction. To understand what role Spry2 might play during developmental processes, we created a Spry2 conventional knockout mouse in which Spry2 expression is replaced by enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) reporter. Spry2 appears to be expressed in mouse embryo and in many adult tissues, and Spry2- deficient mice have smaller body size and …

Land Use/Land Cover Change And Its Hydrological Impacts From 1984 To 2010 In The Little River Watershed, Tennessee, Chunhao Zhu

Masters Theses

Land use/land cover (LULC) change, especially the conversion from farmland to residential and commercial land, has led to significant environmental issues in changing fluvial dynamics, accelerating sediment erosion and degrading water quality. The Little River, which provides drinking water for over 100,000 residents in Blount County, Tennessee, and serves as a source of agriculture and recreational activities, was listed as one of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Targeted Watersheds because the water quality of its tributaries has become impaired due to several reasons. In this study, a detailed record of LULC change in a roughly 2-year interval was documented …

Nuclear Modification Factor For Production Of Open Heavy Flavor At Forward Rapidity In Cu+Cu Collisions, Archil Garishvili

Masters Theses

The PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory with its muon spectrometer has the ability to detect muons over the range of pseudorapidity 1.1 < |eta| < 2.25. Single muon production is an important tool for studying heavy flavor production via semi-leptonic decays of open heavy flavor mesons. Because of their large mass, heavy quarks are produced in earlier stages of heavy ion collisions. Therefore, heavy flavor production can serve as an important probe of the Quark Gluon Plasma, a novel state of matter predicted to be created at RHIC. The measurement of the nuclear modification factor of open heavy flavor at forward rapidity in Cu+Cu collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}}=200 GeV is presented. Measurements of heavy flavor production in p+p collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}}=200 GeV will be also presented.

Relationship Of Age Of Onset And Other Dimensions Of Trauma To Dissociation In An Adult Clinical Population, Amineh Abbas

Masters Theses

This study examined four dimensions of trauma and how they affected levels of dissociation in male and female adult outpatients. These dimensions are age of onset, multiple trauma, chronicity, and recency. Two hundred forty-five adult outpatients at the University of Tennessee Psychological Clinic were administered the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) and the Traumatic Experiences Checklist (TEC) as part of the routine intake procedure. Of those individuals, 177 patients reported trauma and were included in the final study sample. All four dimensions of trauma were found to be significantly correlated with dissociation. In addition, multiple trauma was found to be the …

U.S Inflight Icing Accidents And Incidents, 2006 To 2010., Philip Appiah-Kubi

Masters Theses

Through its recommendations, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has helped the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) introduce regulations that have helped to curtail icing accidents1 (an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft where as a result of the operation of an aircraft, any person receives fatal or serious injury or any aircraft receives substantial damage) and incidents1 (an occurrence, other than an accident, associated with the operation of an aircraft that affects or could affect the safety of operations). However, "the only acceptable safety goal of zero accident," proposed by former Secretary of Transportation, Federico Fabian Pena, has …

An Evaluation Of Population Estimators And Forage Availability And Nutritional Quality For White-Tailed Deer In Tennessee, Jared Tyler Beaver

Masters Theses

Given the white-tailed deer’s (Odocoileus virginianus; deer) popularity and potentially negative impact on forested systems; Arnold Air Force Base (AAFB) in Tullahoma, Tennessee, USA has made minimizing negative deer impacts on biodiversity a priority. To address these management issues, I initiated a study on AAFB to investigate deer survey techniques and the effects of deer density on forage availability across vegetative communities.

Current use of infrared-triggered cameras (camera) for estimating deer populations does not provide a measure of precision critical for density estimation. I conducted a camera survey for deer in Wildlife Management Area (WMA) Units 1 and …

Quasi-One-Dimensional Flow For Use In Real-Time Facility Simulations, Brett Matthew Boylston

Masters Theses

Simulations have been, and continue to play, an important role at the Arnold Engineering Development Center as an aid in control system development and operator training. These models were just simple lumped-parameter methods. Since their initial inception, over ten years ago, little work has been done to increase the fidelity of the models. The processing power of the computer hardware used by the simulations has increased dramatically during this time and this left an opening for improvements to the models adopted in the simulation. To fill this void a quasi-one-dimensional control volume has been developed to run in real-time. The …

Factors Related To Nest Survival And Over-Winter Survival Of A Northern Bobwhite (Colinus Virginianus) Population In Southwest Florida, Steven Kenneth Brinkley

Masters Theses

The northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) is a gallinaceous upland game bird dependent on early successional grassland habitat for reproduction and survival. Bobwhite populations have been declining range-wide for nearly a half century. The habitat of Babcock-Webb Wildlife Management Area (BWWMA) in southwest Florida is mostly virgin, early successional grassland and pine flatwoods. Although BWWMA is located in the far southern end of the bobwhite range, the area is a popular public land for bobwhite hunting. The BWWMA bobwhite population has declined evidenced by a dramatic decrease in harvest over the last 20 years. The two objectives of my …

Application Of Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry Techniques To The Study Of Two Biological Systems, Mary E. Eisenhauer

Masters Theses

Quorum sensing is a type of bacterial cell-cell communication that uses diffusible signaling molecules to allow the regulation of gene expression based on cell density. The two types of signaling molecules discussed here are autoinducer-2 (AI-2) and a class of signaling molecules of the N-acylhomoserine lactone type (AHL) also known as autoinducer-1 (AI-1). The biosynthesis of both of these molecules has origins in a metabolic pathway. Although undisputed in some cases, the role of AI-2 and AHLs in bacterial systems has come into question. Here, the functionalities of these molecules were investigated by utilizing isotope-labeled versions of both AI-2 …

Communicating Via Knoxblab, Roger Kevin Gray

Masters Theses

This study is a Uses and Gratifications based look at motivations surrounding long-term participation in an internet discussion forum and perceived effects of this participation on users’ social lives. Members of the Knoxville, TN based web forum “Knoxblab” were interviewed for the study. Participants indicated that the forum is a tool by which social ties are maintained and developed, and they indicated that membership in the forum community is perceived as having positive effects on social activity. Consistent with traditional Uses and Gratifications Theory, results suggest that participants are motivated by reasons related to information sharing and entertainment, though web …

Development Of An Environmental Monitoring System For Greenhouse Disease Management, Crystal Marie Kelly

Masters Theses

A commercial African violet (Saintpaulia ionantha) grower experiences yield loss due to a leaf spot disease known as Corynespora casssiicola. Spotted leaves make the plants unmarketable. Outbreaks of the disease are costly and difficult to prevent. Greenhouse monitoring systems currently available on the commercial market do not have sufficient spatial or temporal resolution to be able to correlate the environmental conditions of the greenhouse with disease outbreaks. A new system was designed specifically to monitor for disease favorable conditions. The system developed for this project consists of several sensor stations and a coordinator station. The coordinator station …

Particle Shielding For Human Spaceflight: Electrostatic Potential Effects On The Störmer Magnetic Dipole Exclusion Region, Benjamin Alan Klamm

Masters Theses

A basic hybrid radiation shield concept, consisting of both a monopole positive electrostatic potential barrier and a current-carrying superconducting solenoid, was predicted to provide a more effective method of shielding a habitable torus region than a solenoid acting alone. A randomized position and velocity vector simulation of equal-energy iron ions using a Lagrangian reference frame was performed on the exact magnetic field integral for the solenoid and a discrete summation electrostatic field for a toroidal monopole array approximating a potential surface. Each particle is injected at a specific energy (100, 150 MeV and 1 GeV). Two cases were evaluated at …

Late Pleistocene And Holocene Hydroclimate Change In The Southeastern United States: Sedimentary, Pedogenic, And Stable Carbon Isotope Evidence In Tennessee River Floodplain Paleosols, James Joseph Kocis

Masters Theses

In order to understand hydroclimate variability of future climate change, it is important to know the timing and range of natural climate change in the past. The Southeastern United States (SE) is situated along the poleward extent of projected subtropical drying, where the expression of past hydrological balances remains unclear. The lack of high-resolution paleohydroclimate records in the SE forces climate modelers to base interpretations on better-understood regions of North America. The SE likely experienced significant changes in precipitation regimes resulting from its position at the convergence of several oceanic and continental air masses. To reconstruct precipitation variability, this study …

Comparative Study On Posture And Its Influences On Horizontal Ground Reaction Forces Generated By Muscles: Implications For Crouch Gait, Hoa Xuan Hoang

Masters Theses

Crouch gait decreases walking efficiency due to the increased knee and hip flexion during the stance phase of gait. Crouch gait is generally considered to be disadvantageous for patients with cerebral palsy; however, a crouched posture may afford biomechanical advantages that lead some patients to adopt a crouch gait.

To investigate one possible advantage of crouch gait, a musculoskeletal model created in OpenSim was placed in 15 different postures from upright to severe crouch during initial, middle, and final stance of the gait cycle. A series of optimizations were performed for each posture to maximize ground reaction forces for the …

Structural And Stratigraphic Relationships Near The Southern Terminus Of The Pulaski Fault, Northeast Tennessee, Phillip Michael Derryberry

Masters Theses

The Pulaski fault is one of the master thrust faults in the Appalachian Alleghanian fold-thrust belt. Detailed geologic mapping of Cambrian and Ordovician strata in northeastern Tennessee revealed key structural and stratigraphic characteristics for distinguishing the Pulaski thrust sheet from its footwall, the Saltville thrust sheet. Unlike most thrust systems in the Valley and Ridge, the Pulaski records at least two deformation phases. Geometric and crosscutting relationships along parts of the Pulaski thrust sheet in this study area and in southwestern Virginia suggest hanging wall and possibly some footwall deformation prior to the emplacement of the thrust sheet. The initial …

Influence Of Timing Of Prescribed Burn On Native-Warm Season Grass Forage Quality In Tennessee, Amanda L. Mathenia

Masters Theses

Native warm-season grass stands have the prospective to provide nutritious summer forage in grazing systems. The study examined the influence of timing of prescribed burn on native warm-season grass stands in Tennessee. The purpose of the study was to determine the nutritional quality of forage as it relates to the timing of prescribed burns on native warm-season grass stands in Tennessee. The prescribed burns were conducted in March, April, May, and September. Forage samples were collected at Ames Plantation, West Tennessee Research and Education Center, Bridgestone/Firestone Wildlife Management Area, and Yuchi Wildlife Management Area. These samples were then analyzed for …

Power Management For Gpu-Cpu Heterogeneous Systems, Xue Li

Masters Theses

In recent years, GPU-CPU heterogeneous architectures have been increasingly adopted in high performance computing, because of their capabilities of providing high computational throughput. However, current research focuses mainly on the performance aspects of GPU-CPU architectures, while improving the energy efficiency of such systems receives much less attention. There are few existing efforts that try to lower the energy consumption of GPU-CPU architectures, but they address either GPU or CPU in an isolated manner and thus cannot achieve maximized energy savings. In this paper, we propose GreenGPU, a holistic energy management framework for GPU-CPU heterogeneous architectures. Our solution features a two-tier …

Eat The Rainbow! An Evaluation Of A Short-Term Fruit And Vegetable Nutrition Education Intervention For Elementary School Children, Elizabeth Diane Miller

Masters Theses

Objective: To test differences on mean fruit and vegetable (FV) eaten, liking, preference, and self-efficacy scores among 3 modes of nutrition education intervention after a 3-week intervention.

Design: Convenience sample, pre- and post-test, quasi-experimental design.

Setting: Three elementary schools in a rural Eastern Tennessee County.

Participants: Participants were 160 3^rd-5^th graders.

Interventions: Three study schools: experiential (nutrition education, taste tests, and learning activity), conventional (nutrition education and learning activity), and control (learning activity).

Main Outcome Measures: Changes in pre- to post-intervention mean FV eaten, liking, preference, and self-efficacy scores.

Analysis: Mixed model ANOVA to compare the mean …

Consequences Of Gene Flow And Transgene Introgression In Hybrids Between Transgenic Brassica Napus And Its Weedy Wild Relative Brassica Rapa, Reginald Jason Millwood

Masters Theses

The adventitious presence of transgenes and their potential impact on the environment has been a topic of concern for many years. To address these concerns the following chapters discuss past and current research of gene flow and introgression, methods for transgene detection and monitoring, and the results from field-level experiments using artificially introgressed advanced generation hybrids. The field studies were designed to be a worst-case scenario where hybrids were produced by hand-crossing transgenic Brassica napus (AACC, 2n = 38) and its weedy wild relative Brassica rapa (AA, 2n = 20). B. napus was transgenic for the green fluorescent protein [m-GFP-5 …

Assessing Mitochondrial Activity In Embryos From Heat-Stressed Ova, Kimberly Ann Nagle

Masters Theses

Elevated ambient temperatures negatively impacts pregnancy rates in agriculturally important females. An oocyte undergoing meiotic maturation exposed to a physiologically-relevant heat stress results in alterations of developmentally important processes and reportedly decreases subsequent developmental potential after fertilization. To address problems of reduced competence after exposure to heat stress for the first 12 h of meiotic maturation (hIVM), Payton (2009) assessed the transcriptome profiles of oocytes and associated cumulus cells by microarray analysis and reported heat-induced perturbations at the molecular level in the oocyte. Specifically, 20 transcripts involved in mitochondrial function exhibited alterations in relative abundance of heat-stressed oocytes …

Processes Controlling The Composition Of First-Cycle Sediments Deposited In An Arid-Climate, With Implications For Provenance Reconstruction Studies, Aubrey Lynn Modi

Masters Theses

Petrologic analysis of first-cycle clastic sediments derived from a single source in an arid environment provides a means to determine how well they resemble the petrology and geochemistry of their source. The Stepladder Mountains, located in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California, represents a well-controlled location (i.e., arid environment; single, known source; short transport distance) to examine how naturally formed sediments acquire their compositions. Compositional modifications associated with sediment production were resolved through direct examination of the weathered components (regolith, grus, and sediments). Sediment compositions strongly vary by grain size, indicating that, after the source itself, hydrodynamic sorting played the …

Cytongrasp: Cyton Alpha Controller Via Graspit! Simulation, Nicholas Wayne Overfield

Masters Theses

This thesis addresses an expansion of the control programs for the Cyton Alpha 7D 1G arm. The original control system made use of configurable software which exploited the arm’s seven degrees of freedom and kinematic redundancy to control the arm based on desired behaviors that were configured off-line. The inclusions of the GraspIt! grasp planning simulator and toolkit enables the Cyton Alpha to be used in more proactive on-line grasping problems, as well as, presenting many additional tools for on-line learning applications. In short, GraspIt! expands what is possible with the Cyton Alpha to include many machine learning tools and …

Thermocouple Temperature Measurements For Twin Jet Thermal Mixing, Spero Michael Peters

Masters Theses

Thermocouples are commonly used devices for temperature measurement. This study concerns the implementation of thermocouples to collect thermal mixing data in an environment in which two parallel water jets are mixing. The measurements are taken with the purpose of modeling the jet mixing region so that Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models can be validated against the test data. This thesis covers the design, construction, implementation and evaluation of a thermocouple system for immersion in a water environment to measure the thermal mixing of twin jets.

The measurement system being used is a thermocouple rake whose design and fabrication is covered. …

Functional Characterization Of An Endoglucanase From Tribolium Castaneum (Tceg1) In Saccharomyces Cerevisiae And Characterization Of Cellulolytic Activity In The Digestive Fluids Of Thermobia Domestica (Zygentoma: Lepismatidae), Derek Mychel Shirley

Masters Theses

Cellulosic ethanol has the potential to be a significant biofuel due to its sustainability and high energy yield. However it is the recalcitrance of cellulose that presents a costly road block in the economic feasibility of cellulosic ethanol production. The enzymatic degradation of lignocellulosic biomass has the greatest potential for reducing the production costs of this process. While many commercially viable cellulases have been identified in bacteria and fungi, insects remain a relatively untapped source of these enzymes. In fact recent studies have shown that insects produce highly active endogenous cellulases capable of completely hydrolyzing cellulose to glucose, without the …

A Novel Free Form Femoral Cutting Guide, Wesley Andrew Underwood

Masters Theses

Knee arthoplasty is a common procedure that requires the removal of damaged bone and cartilage from the distal femur so that a reconstructive implant may be installed. Traditionally, a five planar resection has been accomplished with a universal cutting box and navigated with either metal jigs or optically tracked computer navigation systems. Free form, or curved, resections have been made possible with surgical robots which control the resection pathway and serve as the navigation system. The free form femoral cutting guide serves as a non powered framework to guide a standard surgical drill along an anatomically defined pathway, resulting in …

Describing Home Play Food Availability Among Preschoolers Within A Nutritional Context: Relationships With Gender, Food Preferences, Food Neophobia, And Maternal Feeding Styles, Jenna Marie Waters

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to describe home play food within a nutritional context, specifically related to gender, food neophobia, maternal feeding styles, and food preference among pre-school aged children. Additionally, our aim was to gain a better understanding of how play foods may serve as a proxy for exposure and how this might affect food familiarity and preference in this population. Mothers of children ages 2 to 5 years (n=181) were recruited from a children’s consignment event in Knoxville, Tennessee, to complete a survey to assess home play food availability, children’s dietary preferences, maternal feeding style, and food …

Improvements In Multi-Tool Surveying Efficiency For Archaeological Geophysics, Caitlyn Marie Williams

Masters Theses

Conventional archaeological excavation methods are, by nature, extremely invasive and result in study areas being irrevocably altered for the sake of research. For this reason, near-surface geophysical techniques have been incorporated into archaeological investigations to aid in determining the locations of buried features with minimal damage to the site. The objective of this research was to perform a geophysical survey at an archaeological site on the Akrotiri Peninsula in Cyprus to locate evidence of a Roman naval base and to develop an improved data management workflow that will improve the usefulness of geophysical data to archaeologists.

An on-site archaeologist determined …

Automating Real-Time Fault Detection For The University Of Tennessee Space Institute, Aviation Systems’ Flight Testing And Airborne Science Applications, Samuel Vivek Williams

Masters Theses

The UTSI Aviation Systems program has conducted many successful airborne science campaigns in collaboration with premier research organizations including NASA and NOAA. Each airborne science mission requires dedicated FTEs to monitor the various instruments onboard the aircraft. A typical mission requires aircraft to be instrumented with a wide range of sensors (with approximately 145 data parameters). Monitoring the instruments requires highly skilled personnel who have a thorough understanding of the system.

With the advent of UTSI Aviation Systems program increasing capabilities to conduct multiple missions, using multiple airborne platforms, the requirement of a skilled FTE for each mission could effectively …