Digital Commons Network^™

A Study Of High-Chroma Inks For Expanding Cmyk Color Gamut, Sanyukta Sanjay Hiremath

Theses

The number of possible reproducible colors in a printing method is called the color gamut. The need to satisfy the growing quality demands and produce color match has given rise to the use of expanded color gamuts. There are many ways to achieve an expanded color gamut, including printing with Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (CMYK) plus additional inks, printing with higher ink film thickness (IFT), and printing with high-chroma inks. The purpose of this research is to study the relationship between color gamut volume, metric chroma (C*), IFT, and solid ink density (SID) for regular and high-chroma inks in offset …

Discriminative Feature Extraction Of Time-Series Data To Improve Temporal Pattern Detection Using Classification Algorithms, David Stolze

Theses

Time-series data streams often contain predictive value in the form of unique patterns. While these patterns may be used as leading indicators for event prediction, a lack of prior knowledge of pattern shape and irregularities can render traditional forecasting methods ineffective. The research in this thesis tested a means of predetermining the most effective combination of transformations to be applied to time-series data when training a classifier to predict whether an event will occur at a given time. The transformations tested on provided data streams included subsetting of the data, aggregation over various numbers of data points, testing of different …

Learning To Rank Relevant Files For Bug Reports Using Domain Knowledge, Replication And Extension Of A Learning-To-Rank Approach, Nasir Safdari

Theses

Bug localization is one of the most important stages of the bug fixing process. Bad practices make the debugging a tedious task. Investigating bugs can contribute up to a large portion of the aggregate cost for a software project. An automated strategy that can provide a ranked list of source code files with respect to how likely they contain the root cause of the problem would help the development teams to decrease the search space and leads to increase in the productivity. In this work, I have replicated the bug localization approach presented in \cite{ye2014learning} that applies the learning-to-rank technique …

Interpreting The Lemuria As Pietas, Jessica Lynn Leonard

Theses

The Roman idea of pietas was an important value during the Augustan revival of Rome in the first century. Ovid wrote about a unique ritual in the poem Fasti that focused on piety towards ancestors called Lemuria. The original meaning of the Lemuria ritual has changed through the centuries by the power of the Christian Church and modern Christian bias. The anachronistic language used in the translations of Ovid’s Fasti and the choice of words that historians have used to interpret it portrays the Lemuria in an occult-like expulsive way. The Lemuria is not comparable to Christian ritual as some …

The Visit: A Full Length Play, Rosalia A. Portillo

Theses

The Visit served as my thesis production to fulfill the requirements for a Masters of Fine Arts from Lindenwood University. This paper details my role as director in the production from its conception, to production, to evaluation. I will explore the details of my process for the project as well as what I have learned.

Nutrition Knowledge Among Adolescent Athletes, Caregivers, And Coaches, Ann-Kathrin Puschkasch

Theses

The thesis, Nutrition Knowledge Among Adolescent Athletes, Caregivers, and Coaches, explores the nutritional knowledge of these three groups and highlights gaps that may impact young athletes' performance and health. Conducted in Missouri, the study used customized online surveys to evaluate participants' understanding of general and sports nutrition, including macronutrients, hydration, and supplementation. A total of 306 participants, comprising 47 athletes, 117 caregivers, and 142 coaches, completed the surveys.

Findings revealed significant gaps in knowledge across all groups, though coaches scored the highest, followed by caregivers and then athletes. For example, many athletes lacked awareness of basic nutritional concepts like …

An Evaluation Of The Good Behavior Game Using An Interdependent Group Contingency With Middle-School Children With Ebd, Shanice D. Harvey

Theses

The present study evaluated the effectiveness of an interdependent group contingency commonly referred to as the “good behavior game” (GBG) on reducing disruptive behaviors in a dedicated classroom for students with emotional behavioral disorder (EBD). The participants were four eighth-grade middle school students, with a primary diagnosis of EBD. The intervention targeted inappropriate and disruptive behaviors during two class periods (math and science), as well appropriate alternative behaviors. The class was divided into two teams, with the four participants divided evenly amongst both teams. If a team met the criterion for both inappropriate and appropriate behavior during experimental sessions, each …

An Analysis Of Stresses And Displacements Around A Fault Plane Due To Longwall Face Advance In Coal Mining, Corbin Grant Carlton

Theses

This study has examined 3D stresses and displacements around a longwall mining system that is intercepted by a geological fault. More specifically, the study has analyzed the effect of a fault on longwall gate development entries, set-up rooms, T-junctions, and the longwall face as the longwall face progressed toward, through, and away from the fault. A general lithologic sequence and mining parameters related to the Herrin No. 6 coal seam in southern Illinois were employed. FLAC3D structural analysis code was used for simulating two (2) adjacent longwall faces. Linear elastic rock mass elements with non-linear elastic-plastic fault elements were analyzed …

A Td's Awakening: A Technical Direction Thesis On Spring Awakening, Andrew Julian Armas

Theses

This document, A TD’s Awakening: A Technical Direction Thesis on Spring Awakening, is a detailed description of the technical direction process for Southern Illinois University Department of Theater’s Fall 2017 production of Spring Awakening: A New Musical. Chapter One dives into script analysis and includes a scene breakdown and technical requirements for the production as well as a discussion of the goals I wished to accomplish with this project. Chapter Two details the development of the design for the production and examines the monetary and time budgets for the scenic units. Chapter 3 is a detailed account of the production …

Illuminating Dietary And Physiological Change In An Insectivorous Bat Community Exposed To Artificial Light At Night, Zachary Cravens

Theses

Global light pollution is increasing worldwide, nearly doubling over the past 25 years, and the encroachment of artificial light into remaining dark areas threatens to disturb natural rhythms of wildlife species, such as bats. Artificial light impacts the behaviour of insectivorous bats in numerous ways, including changing foraging behaviour and altering prey selection. I conducted two manipulative field experiments to investigate effects of light pollution on prey selection in an insectivorous bat community. In the first experiment, I collected fecal samples from 6 species of insectivorous bats in naturally dark and artificially lit conditions and identified prey items using molecular …

Eye Diagram Assessment Platform For Fiber-Optic Communications, Anurag Dattu Gaikwad

Theses

The basic idea of this thesis is to provide a simple, easy to use and cost-effective eye-diagram analysis kit for educational lab environment. Mostly eye-diagram analysis is done on high-end oscilloscopes or with LabView as a source-code; this research uses Flashy board (Pluto 3 and ADC) a small FPGA kit from a company called KNJN, for acquiring signals and then gives those signals to python for analysis. The main reason for considering Flashy board was because it was cost-effective, and it operates in our frequency range of operation i.e. between 10MHz to 100MHz. This thesis is developed with python as …

The Influence Of Tooth Surface Modifications On The Sensitivity Of Involute Cylindrical Gears To Manufacturing Errors, Scott Eisele

Theses

Gear drives, like all mechanical devices, are subject to manufacturing errors and defects. Higher levels of precision in manufacturing to increase the quality of the gears are costly, but sometimes required to attain sufficient performance from a gear drive. However, certain intentional microgeometry modifications to the gear tooth surfaces can be used to reduce the sensitivity of the gear drive to manufacturing errors. These changes in tooth surface design can be simple and cheap to implement, and result in a more robust gear drive which is more indifferent to manufacturing errors. In this thesis, the influence on intentional micro-geometry modifications …

Constraints And Explanation, Alexander Bolano

Theses

For the past 40 years, causal-mechanical approaches to explanation in science have been the received view. In this paper, I will argue that causal-mechanical approaches to explanation are not the whole story; there is a notable class of explanations that I call constraining explanation. Constraining explanation do not work by describing some causal structure; rather they work by highlighting mathematical constraints on what kinds of structure there can be. Constraining explanations are different that causal explanations because they give a kind of modal knowledge that causal-mechanical explanation alone cannot give.

Fiction And Politics: Karl May And The American West In Nineteenth Century German Sociopolitical Consciousness, Emily Scott

Theses

This thesis seeks to answer the following question: Why did the nineteenth century novels and short stories of Karl May, which take place in the American West, find such great commercial success in Germany? Through the examination of the novels themselves, in addition to various primary and secondary sources related to the life of May and the historical context in which this phenomenon took place, this question is answered. Though the novels take place in an American landscape, they are full of references to various cultural and political phenomena which took place throughout the course of May’s life in Germany. …

Knock-Knock! Whose Peer? The Epistemic Significance Of Humor, Kaci Harrison

Theses

Debates about the epistemic significance of peer disagreement are highly idealized. Some have even suggested that genuine cases of epistemic peer disagreement never in fact obtain, since even seemingly trivial differences in experience and attitudes can bias evidential processing. This thesis defends the view that these criticisms are overstated: the problem is not that epistemic peer disagreements do not exist, but rather that we lack an account of how it is possible to identify our epistemic peers. I argue that attention to the sense of humor provides one important source of evidence regarding the experiences and attitudes of others that …

Efficient Reduced Bias Genetic Algorithm For Generic Community Detection Objectives, Aditya Karnam Gururaj Rao

Theses

The problem of community structure identification has been an extensively investigated area for biology, physics, social sciences, and computer science in recent years for studying the properties of networks representing complex relationships. Most traditional methods, such as K-means and hierarchical clustering, are based on the assumption that communities have spherical configurations. Lately, Genetic Algorithms (GA) are being utilized for efficient community detection without imposing sphericity. GAs are machine learning methods which mimic natural selection and scale with the complexity of the network. However, traditional GA approaches employ a representation method that dramatically increases the solution space to be searched by …

Social Media: On Tech-Caves, Virtual Panopticism, And The Science Fiction-Like State In Which We Unwittingly Find Ourselves, Michael Major

Theses

Making use of three historic philosophical thought experiments, this paper blends psychological perspectives with philosophical reasoning to show how social media is corrupting our perception of reality, the result of which is ultimately detrimental to society as a whole. This is accomplished by first using Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to analyze and discuss the ways in which social media is limiting humanity’s access to real knowledge. Next, Michel Foucault’s analysis of punishment in its social context, Discipline and Punish, is used to discuss the ways in which social media is adversely affecting our behavior. Finally, Robert Nozick’s “Experience …

Driving Forces In Disclosure: Self-Disclosure Goals And Intimacy At The Podium, Layne Paubel

Theses

This study examined six underlying motivations (expression, self-clarification, social validation, relationship development, social control, and information sharing) for self-disclosure in a public speaking setting and a dyadic relationship setting. Five of these goals come from Derlega and Grzelak’s (1979) functional approach to self-disclosure and one is an additional goal examined by Bazarova and Choi (2014). This study found that the relative salience of self-disclosure goals in the public speaking classroom was identity clarification, information sharing, self-expression/relief of distress, social validation, relationship development, and social control. Findings indicate that the relative salience of goals in the dyadic relationship setting was self-expression/relief …

Evaluation Of Vaporization Enthalpies And Vapor Pressures Of Various Aroma And Pharmacologically Active Compounds By Correlation Gas Chromatography, Daniel Simmons

Theses

Scientists in the pharmaceutical, food, and aroma industries can benefit from reliable thermochemical data. Vaporization enthalpy and vapor pressure data are not available for all compounds. Furthermore, some literature data is conflicting. The goal of this work was to use a method called correlation gas chromatography (CGC) to generate reliable vaporization enthalpy data in instances where other experimental methods are not applicable. Vapor pressures of the targets were also calculated in cases where the required literature data on the standards used in this technique were available.

CGC involves making a standard cocktail that includes a mixture of standards and one …

Planning To Fail: The Eurozone, Its Sovereign Debt Crisis, And The Future Of The Union, Kyle Whitworth

Theses

The European Union has been one of the greatest accomplishments of modern history. Through economic and political integration has ended centuries of warfare on the continent while producing the worlds largest trading bloc. Despite the initial success of the monetary union and its single currency, the Union has been bogged down economic troubles in the form of a debt crisis among several of the member states. The recovery period of the crisis has produced growth that is slow and uneven. Countries such as Germany has assumed the role of the economic powerhouse of Europe and therefore a political leader in …

Analysis Of Grape Berry Epiphytic Microbiomes Via Qiime, Isabelle O'Bryon

Theses

Research in the wine industry has previously characterized many aspects of the wine making process from soil fertility to the community of microbes in must and wine, but the epiphytic bacterial and fungal communities have not been studied throughout grape development. This project aims to investigate the epiphytic grape microbiome to better understand its role in disease and grape development, and the effects of terroir on the microbiome, by examining the epiphytic microbiome of developing and sour rot infected grapes in New York and Tasmania. Sour rot is characterized by a distinct vinegar smell that is caused by the combination …

For The Sake Of The Intellect, Let Them Have Art: A Possible Reconciliation For The Value Of Mimetic Arts In The 'Republic', Breanna Liddell

Theses

This paper explores the possibility of a cohesive philosophy that recognizes both Plato’s concern about art as a moral danger in the Republic and the aesthete’s—a worthy adversary—position of art as something worth preserving. Plato understood the arts as mimêsis, or imitative and representational. Additionally, this paper suggests that Plato’s take on art extends beyond the limited realm of the performative arts that depict the misguided actions of Greek heroes and gods and how those arts positively or negatively impact the educational development of a citizen of the Republic. Rather, I assert that what he means by “art” is …

How We Refactor And How We Mine It ? A Large Scale Study On Refactoring Activities In Open Source Systems, Eman Abdullah Alomar

Theses

Refactoring, as coined by William Obdyke in 1992, is the art of optimizing the syntactic design of a software system without altering its external behavior. Refactoring was also cataloged by Martin Fowler as a response to the existence of design defects that negatively impact the software's design. Since then, the research in refactoring has been driven by improving systems structures. However, recent studies have been showing that developers may incorporate refactoring strategies in other development related activities that go beyond improving the design. In this context, we aim in better understanding the developer's perception of refactoring by mining and automatically …

Adjustment Of Parametric Dynamic Scheduling Heuristics For Heterogeneous Systems To Account For Heterogeneity, Thomas G. Guerin

Theses

Modern computing applications are becoming increasingly data-hungry and computationally expensive. This trend continues even as hardware performance constraints loom with the impending death of Moore's law. Hence, systems have become increasingly heterogeneous in the pursuits of improving performance and reducing power consumption. Such a heterogeneous system relies on a variety of different specialized processors with differing architectures, rather than processing units of a single type. Given their architectural differences, any given computation will not perform equally on all processors. As such, efficient scheduling of computations to processors is an essential design consideration.

In this thesis work, a simulation of an …

Design Considerations For Training Memristor Crossbars Used In Spiking Neural Networks, Lydia M. Hays

Theses

CMOS/Memristor integrated architectures have shown to be powerful for realizing energy-efficient learning machines. These architectures are recently demonstrated in reservoir computing networks, which have reduced training complexity and resource utilization. In reservoir computing, the training time is curtailed due to random weight initialization in the hidden layer, which will remain constant during training. The CMOS/memristor variability can be exploited to generate these random weights and reduce the area overhead. Recent studies have shown that the CMOS/memristor crossbars are ideal for on-device learning machines, including reservoir computing networks. An exemplary CMOS/memristor crossbar based on-device accelerator, Ziksa, was demonstrated on several of …

Sustainable Learning Through Architecture Elementary School: A Synergy Of Metrics, Anita Parvathi Darla

Theses

Sustainability (noun): “Sustainable development is built environment that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

When is a good time for our future generations to start learning about sustainability? Education is humanity’s best hope and most effective means in the quest to achieve sustainable future. Sustainability has become a priority and needs to be addressed as a school of thought from a very young age to be more effective and achieve better results. Research shows that sustainability education must begin in early childhood when children tend to learn, absorb, …

Assessing The Influence Of Variable Cognitive Load On Fatigue Development And Recovery Of The First Dorsal Interosseous Muscle, Sidharajsinh Jadeja

Theses

Localized muscle fatigue (LMF) has been associated to many adverse effects on human performance and the risk of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). While the development of LMF can be dependent on several factors, the influence of cognitive demands is still uncertain. This study analyzed the influence of varying levels of cognitive load for a simple biomechanical system involving static exertions at a moderate level (25% of maximum voluntary capacity). Participants performed 1-hour sessions of intermittent isometric abductions of the index finger for four experimental conditions including passive rest and added cognitive load in the form of an arithmetic task. Both …

I Need You, Hao Shen

Theses

I Need You is a 4-minute 3D-animation thesis film. This 3D animation film premiered on May 12, 2017 in the School of Film and Animation’s End-of-Semester screenings program at Rochester Institute of Technology.

This story is about a grown son who returns to his father’s house to help his father find the source of a mysterious ghost-like, screeching sound inside the house. However, the son is really confronted with his relationship with his father.

I Need You is a 3D Virtual Reality animation that combines traditional 2D, 3D software and game engine to create a new-tech 3D animation film. The …

What The Smell? An Empirical Investigation On The Distribution And Severity Of Test Smells In Open Source Android Applications, Anthony Shehan Ayam Peruma

Theses

The widespread adoption of mobile devices, coupled with the ease of developing mobile-based applications (apps) has created a lucrative and competitive environment for app developers. Solely focusing on app functionality and time-to-market is not enough for developers to ensure the success of their app. Quality attributes exhibited by the app must also be a key focus point; not just at the onset of app development, but throughout its lifetime.

The impact analysis of bad programming practices, or code smells, in production code has been the focus of numerous studies in software maintenance. Similar to production code, unit tests are also …

An Investigation Of Low Frequency Noise In Server Rooms, Ahmed Al Naami

Theses

Noise in a server room can have a major impact on the performance and well-being of the occupants. Sound level and low frequency noise are considered factors that influence the hearing ability of workers. This thesis is an investigation of low-frequency noise in server rooms. We conducted the field study in a server room for a large financial institution. Some employees in this study indicated that they experienced headaches from the noise and requested an analysis of the sound to determine if there were any potential adverse health effects. Attributes of the noise were investigated by evaluating the sound pressure …