Digital Commons Network^™

Measurement Of Finger Coordination During A Motor Learning Task, Robert Ebel

Theses

The focus of this study is to observe the changes in whole hand grasp strategy, in healthy subjects, over time in a series of isometric force control learning tasks. During a series of trials with real-time visual feedback of the five finger forces, subjects adapted their grasp strategy in order to reach the target in a time efficient manner. In early trials, it is very evident that subjects focus on controlling the force output of one finger at a time until they reach the goal. As the block of trials progresses, subjects alter their strategy to a more coordinated movement …

Using A Bio-Inspired Model To Understand The Evolution Of The Remora Adhesive Disk, Kaelyn Mykel Gamel

Theses

Manmade adhesives often fail on wet, compliant surfaces, which can result in poor performance when attaching sensors in medical, defense, and research situations. However, a number of fishes have evolved adhesive discs that allow adhesion to surfaces under challenging wetted conditions. A remarkable evolutionary advancement is found in the family of echenidae, colloquially known as the remora. In particular, the remora fishes have the ability to attach to wet, compliant bodies under high shear conditions for extended periods of time. This research addresses the lack of underwater adhesives by using remora adhesion as a bioinspired model. Evolution has taken …

Nanocomposite Thermite Powders With Improved Flowability Prepared By Mechanical Milling, Ci Huang

Theses

Nanocomposite thermite powders are of interest to develop varieties of reactive parts and components. Manufacturing these components requires tailoring properties of the thermite powders such as their particle size distributions, particle shapes, and powder flowability. For example, an improved flowability is desired to use these powders as feedstock in additive manufacturing. Arrested reactive milling (ARM) offers a versatile and practical approach for preparing various nanocomposite thermites with fully dense particles, which will retain their structures and mixedness between reactive components while being stored, handled, and processed. However, ARM products usually have broad particle size distributions, rock-like particle shapes, and poor …

Thermal Swing Membrane Based Method For Co2 Capture From Flue Gas, Mukesh Kumar Kamad

Theses

Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and a major contributor to global warming, is released in large amounts by flue gases. To limit climate change, such CO₂ emissions have to be reduced, CO₂ captured and sequestered. Conventional monoethanolamine (MEA)-based absorption techniques are costly due to high capital cost and high energy consumption since the absorbent has to be regenerated at a high temperature ~ 120°C. A temperature swing membrane absorption (TSMAB) process was described by Mulukutla et al. (2015) using a novel membrane contactor, novel absorbents and a cyclic process. In this device, the absorbent is on the shell …

Memorizing Chromic Response To Pressure, Maulik Kiritkumar Padh

Theses

Almost all appliances are prone to mechanical stress in one form or the other. An increasing dependence on machines in daily life calls for a need to increase their maintenance quality. Various materials, methods and configurations to observe mechanical pressure have been devised and this paper discusses one such technique. The use of gold nanoparticles in its one dimensional array causes plasmonic coupling between the nanoparticles, which when disrupted creates a plasmonic shift in its assembly. Such a film, when casted on a polymer with a known elastic limit, causes deformation by an application of stress. This forces the film …

Investigation Of Nh3 And No Adsorption Over Cu/Sapo-34 And Cu/Aloo3 Catalysts For Nh3–Scr System, Basil Rawah

Theses

In this study, Copper supported on SAPO-34 molecular sieves or alumina is prepared via an incipient wetness impregnation method for ammonia selective catalytic reduction (NH₃-SCR). These NH₃-SCR catalysts are characterized by pulse chemisorption, temperature-programmed reduction (TPR), and temperature-programmed desorption (TPD) with three different conditions (NH₃, NO, combined NH₃-NO) to evaluate the adsorption of ammonia and nitric oxide. Cu/SAPO-34 catalyst has shown higher ammonia adsorption capacity compared to Cu/Al₂O₃ catalyst. The Cu/SAPO-34 adsorption is enhanced due to the strong acidity and high surface area of SAPO-34 molecular sieves. NO adsorption …

Power Dissipation And Power Correlations For A Retreatblade Impeller Under Different Baffling Conditions, Chadakarn Sirasitthichoke

Theses

Glass-lined stirred reactors and tanks are commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry because of their corrosion resistance, ease of cleanliness and minimization of product contamination. Most industrial glass-lined tank reactors are provided with a torispherical tank bottom and a retreat curve impeller with low impeller clearance from the vessel bottom. The power, P, dissipated by the impeller is a critical process parameter to mixing processes to achieve the desired mixing effect, especially since the power per unit volume, P/V, directly controls mass transfer processes and other mixing phenomena. However, little information has been published about the power dissipation and the …

Undersampling Ga-Svm For Network Intrusion Detection, Zhenyu He

Theses

Network intrusion detection is one of the hottest issues in the world. An increasing number of researchers and engineers deal with this problem by using machine learning methods. However, how to improve the identification accuracy of all the attack classes remains unsolved since the dataset is an imbalanced one with high imbalance ratio. This thesis work intends to build a classifier to achieve high classification accuracy. It proposes an undersampling Genetic Algorithm-Support Vector Machine (GA-SVM) method to handle this problem. It applies an undersampling method in GA-SVM. To solve the multiclassification problem with a binary classifier, this work proposes to …

The Influence Of Ethnocentrism In Food Neophobic Students, Ana Carolina Jurza Rios

Theses

Economic and social changes occurring after Croatia´s entrance to European Union require a more intense research on consumers´ openness to a new and globalized market. A concept known as Consumer Ethnocentrism, when consumers prefer buying domestic rather than foreign products because is detrimental to national economy, is strongly present in post-war markets in the West Balkans. Another phenomenon related to peoples´ fear of trying new or unknown food, called Food Neophobia, has been under study in America and in some European countries. Despite the long list of articles focusing their attention on Consumer Ethnocentrism in the Balkans, none research has …

The Effect Of Watershed Runoff And Sediment Resuspension On Turbidity And Sediment Deposition In St. John, Us Virgin Islands: Implications For Watershed And Marine Development And Restoration In Bays With Coral Reefs, Stephen E. Campbell

Theses

In the US Virgin Islands (USVI), land-based (terrigenous) sedimentation has been identified as a major cause of coral stress. Development, such as the building of unpaved roads in steep coastal watersheds, has increased sediment yields and marine terrigenous sedimentation by up to an order of magnitude above background levels. When activated during storm events, ephemeral streams transport sediment from the watershed to coastal waters. Once deposited on the seafloor, resuspension of benthic sediments can further increase turbidity and deposition. However, isolating the relative contributions of runoff and resuspension to turbidity and deposition using conventional sediment trap monitoring has been challenging. …

Automatic Assessment Of Medication States Of Patients With Parkinson’S Disease Using Wearable Sensors, Murtadha Dawood Hssayeni

Theses

Motor fluctuations are a major focus of clinical managements in patients with mid-stage and advance Parkinson's disease (PD). In this thesis, an automated algorithm is developed to identify those fluctuations (i.e., medication OFF and ON) using wearable sensors while PD patients are engaging in a variety of daily living activities. Four different methods are proposed which are supervised learning using Support Vector machine (SVM) with fuzzy classification, semi-supervised learning using k-means or using Self-organizing Tree Map Algorithm (SOTM) with fuzzy classification, and supervised classification using Long short-term memory (LSTM) as a deep learning method.

A set of temporal and spectral …

Identification Of Differential Expression Of P53 Associated Rnas At 3 Different Treatment Timepoints, And Association With Chip-Seq Identified P53 Genes., Julia Freewoman

Theses

Called “the guardian of the genome,” p53 is one of the most studied proteins associated with cancer. After activation, p53 induces its target genes with different kinetics, i.e., early induction or delayed induction. However, this difference in kinetics of gene induction has not been examined genome-wide. This study uses RNA-seq time course data (0-hour, 6-hour, 12-hour and 24-hour) via drug induction with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), and compares that data to previously published ChIP-seq data. We found that, while there is an induction of a number of genes at 6 hours, there appears to be a delayed phase of induction occurring at …

Assembly Language, Joe S. Lee

Theses

“Assembly Language” is a culmination of an exploration, through the medium of ceramics, in understanding complexity that arises through the interactions between simple components.

In the realm of computer science, the term “Assembly Language” refers to a low-level programming language for any programmable digital device. It is typically just one step above writing in the raw ones and zeros of binary. Every program at some point needs to be translated into assembly language so that it can be understood by the device, and every program that has ever been written for a digital device is essentially composed of a series …

Characterization Of Optimized Si-Mosfets For Terahertz Detection, Jack D. Horowitz

Theses

Research into components needed to utilize the THz region of the electromagnetic spectrum has recently gained more attention due to advances in semiconductor technology and materials science. These advances have led to the desire of create CMOS focal plane arrays (FPA) for THz imaging in a range of applications such as astronomy, security, earth science, industry, and communications. Si-MOSFETs are being investigated as the sensing node in THz FPAs due to their ability to detect THz and their ease of integration into the CMOS process facilitating the fabrication of large format arrays. To investigate the performance of devices fabricated at …

Larval Rockfish Diversity Abundance Dynamics In Association With A Marine Protected Area In The Southern California Bight, Dustin Chen

Theses

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are areas aimed at protecting natural and cultural resources that are often proposed as a way to alleviate the effects of overfishing on populations of targeted species; these areas have varying degrees of fishing and recreational use restrictions. In order to assess MPA efficacy, it is important to determine the mechanisms by which the presence of MPAs affect reproductive output within and potentially even beyond their boundaries. I attempted to address this through studying the responses of rockfish (Sebastes spp.) larval abundances to the presence of the Cowcod Conservation Areas (CCAs) located within the Southern California …

Flux Guard: An Exploration Of Situational Rigidity, Nicholas Miclette

Theses

In 2014 there was an estimated 15 million snowboarders worldwide. Like many extreme sports there is always the possibility of injury. Extensive research has shown snowboarders sustain more wrist injuries than any other sport in the world. In particular beginner or novice snowboarders are the most susceptible to injury and often times wear no protective gear when first learning. Although there has been research into the efficacy of upper extremity protection in snowboarding, a universal standard has yet to be developed to judge current wrist protection. Due to this fact my thesis explores innovative ways to reinvent the wrist guard …

Validation Of A Method To Estimate Skin Spectral Reflectance Using A Digital Camera., Christopher Thorstenson

Theses

The accurate measurement of skin color and skin spectral reflectance is becoming increasingly desirable due to its application across several domains, including medical, cosmetics, graphic arts, automation, and social science fields. While there exist robust ways to accurately measure color and spectral reflectance, these methods typically require the use of specialized instruments which are often expensive, invasive, and require expert training. Therefore, it would clearly be advantageous to develop methods that can extract accurate colorimetric and spectral data from readily-available, inexpensive digital RGB cameras. Such methodology involves overcoming several fundamental obstacles due to the limitations of RGB camera data.

The …

Scalable Digital Architecture Of A Liquid State Machine, Anvesh Polepalli

Theses

Liquid State Machine (LSM) is an adaptive neural computational model with rich dynamics to process spatio-temporal inputs. These machines are extremely fast in learning because the goal-oriented training is moved to the output layer, unlike conventional recurrent neural networks.

The capability to multiplex at the output layer for multiple tasks makes LSM a powerful intelligent engine. These properties are desirable in several machine learning applications such as speech recognition, anomaly detection, user identification etc. Scalable hardware architectures for spatio-temporal signal processing algorithms like LSMs are energy efficient compared to the software implementations. These designs can also naturally adapt to dierent …

Evolution Of The Museum Experience: Mobile Augmented Reality’S Impact On The Visitor Experience At An Outdoor Living Museum, Rita Locke Pettine

Theses

This paper reports the findings of a study to determine if using Mobile AR (augmented reality) to render an exhibit’s supplemental information increased the level of learning and enjoyment of visitors to a living museum, specifically the Pocock Trail located within the Bergen Swamp, which is classified as a “Living Museum”. A museum is identified as “Living” when it “is a natural, wild area that is relatively undisturbed by man. It is an area where the native plant and animal life are maintaining themselves in a natural, biological manner” (BSPS, 2016). When an area is undisturbed by man it is …

The Development And Validation Of A Resource Kit For Use By Ngos Pertaining To The Inclusion Of People With Disabilities In Sport-Based Programmes In Developing Countries, Koffi Atitso Fiati

Theses

The current study is undertaken in relation to the recommendations of both Article 30 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities-UNCRPD, (UN, 2006) and the new Charter on Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport (UNESCO, 2015) to serve as a building block in the improvement of the health of people with disabilities (PWDs).

The study adopted a three-phase sequential mixed method approach with a participatory action research orientation. There was a document analysis, a survey, and interviews. The first phase comprised an analysis of four documents labelled as inclusive sport and physical activities resource kits. …

Rabbit Hole, Chen Wang

Theses

Rabbit Hole is a multimedia installation, which combines drawing, performance, animation, and sculpture to celebrate gender as a performative expression of multiple possibilities while presenting sexual identification as neutral and fluid.

In Rabbit Hole, I present an opportunity for the viewer to experience a disorientating fictional space, in which the physical body floats across boundaries. Constructed biomorphic forms entangle and pulsate creating an arena where gender is ever evolving, celebrating a freedom of sexuality. The symbolic representation of the rabbit within the work connects across North American and Chinese Culture.

Effect Of Long-Term Beta-Alanine Supplementation On Performance In Male Collegiate Rugby Athletes, Charles Smith

Theses

This study investigated the effects of six weeks of beta-alanine (BA) supplementation on the anaerobic performance of collegiate male rugby players. Beta-alanine is a precursor to carnosine, an intramuscular buffer that helps maintain pH during high-intensity exercise. Rugby is a sport characterized by repeated bouts of high-intensity efforts, making it a prime candidate to benefit from improved buffering capacity.

Twenty-one male rugby players were recruited for the double-blind, placebo-controlled study, with 16 completing the post-testing. Participants were randomly assigned to either a beta-alanine group (6.4 g/day) or a placebo group (6.4 g/day of maltodextrin). Both groups continued their normal team …

Picking At Scabs, Robert Gordon

Theses

Picking at Scabs is a body of photographic work that engages with the fragile and unreliable nature of memory. The book and installation address, with differing levels of narrative clarity, my adolescent struggles with my father’s alcoholism. In an accompanying book, Five-lined Skink, photographs from the family album are curated and annotated to reclaim the structure and narrative of the photographic record and act as a visual and thematic counterpoint.

The autobiographical work uses recent photographs, images from my personal archive, and photographs from the family album to create an emotional space described by writing. Photographs range from unsettling images …

The Role Of Women In The Economy Of Kosovo, Hana Bacaj

Theses

Inequality in the labor market of Kosovo is persistent; the level of unemployment is very high, with the highest level among women. This paper aims to present the current role of women in the economy of Kosovo; through unpaid or paid work. This paper is based on secondary research, from which patterns about what effects women's current role in the economy of Kosovo were found. Some of these patterns were: 'motherhood,' gender differences in earnings, education, cultural factor etc. Additionally, this paper is based on the analysis of the results from surveys done to women in high profile jobs and …

Deep Learning For Semantic Video Understanding, Sourabh Kulhare

Theses

The field of computer vision has long strived to extract understanding from images and videos sequences. The recent flood of video data along with massive increments in computing power have provided the perfect environment to generate advanced research to extract intelligence from video data. Video data is ubiquitous, occurring in numerous everyday activities such as surveillance, traffic, movies, sports, etc. This massive amount of video needs to be analyzed and processed efficiently to extract semantic features towards video understanding. Such capabilities could benefit surveillance, video analytics and visually challenged people. While watching a long video, humans have the uncanny ability …

A Study Of Cyber Laws In The United Arab Emirates, Mohammed Imranuddin

Theses

The United Arab Emirates, as a developing country has been experiencing cybercrime even more rapidly in the recent years. The overall Internet penetration as well as the use of cyber-based systems in Critical Infrastructure is growing with a never seen pace in the country just as in the rest of the world. UAE has emerged to be on the forefront of many technological advances in the recent past. However, in the case of technological advances security advances must follow or the whole state becomes vulnerable. In the modern world there are several options for a state that wants to improve …

Hegemonic Masculinity And Transphobia, Marilyn Chung

Theses

Transphobia research has focused on predictors and correlations of prejudice toward transgender people. Consistently, male participants have higher transphobic attitudes compared to female participants in various studies. Further, males are overrepresented in crimes against transgender people. However, these studies were correlational and causation cannot be determined. Masculinity researchers outside of psychology have discussed maintenance of masculine privilege as a motivator for oppressive beliefs and actions. Thus, the goal of this study was to provide an experimental study of causes for increased transphobic attitudes in men, based on sociological and gender studies’ research on hegemonic masculinity. To test this, participants were …

In Vitro Apparent Ruminal Digestibility Of Diets Containing Corn Distillers Grain With Different Quantities Of Crude Fat, David Eldridge Williams

Theses

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF David Williams for the Master of Ruminant Nutrition degree in Animal Science, presented on December 12, 2016 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: IN VITRO APPARENT RUMINAL DIGESTIBILITY OF DIETS CONTAINING CORN DISTILLERS GRAIN WITH VARYING LEVELS OF CRUDE FAT MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Rebecca Atkinson
 Four dual-flow continuous fermenters were used in a Latin square design to determine the apparent ruminal digestibility and ruminal characteristics of diets containing dried distillers grains plus solubles (DDGS) at various levels of fat content. Fermenters were randomly assigned to one of the following treatments: 1) 40% DDGS containing …

Time-Activity And Energy Budgets Of Eared Grebes (Podiceps Nigricollis) At Salton Sea, Samantha San Francisco

Theses

Time-activity budgets have been a widely accepted way of approximating the daily energy expenditure of many species, including waterbirds. For this study, focal animal sampling was used to study Eared Grebes (Podiceps nigricollis) at their post-wintering stopover site, Salton Sea. Daylight time-activity budgets were converted to energy budgets using energy equivalents for diving, preening, swimming, and resting on water developed for Eared Grebes previously by H. I. Ellis (1994). Post-wintering Eared Grebes arrive at Salton Sea in waves at differing times in the spring. As a result, there can be individuals in a variety of physiological states during …

Reevaluating Essential Fatty Acid Nutrition In Florida Pompano, Trachinotus Carolinus, And Nile Tilapia, Oreochromis Niloticus, Christopher John Jackson

Theses

Aquaculture is currently the fastest growing sector of protein production, and is expected to overtake the harvest of wild fisheries. Limitations in nutrition, specifically fatty acid nutrition, are preventing even more dramatic growth of many species of commercial importance. Currently, much of the research involving fatty acids examines requirements as being correlated to thermal guilds (warm vs. cool water) or salinity tolerance (marine vs. freshwater). However, recent studies have revealed the potential for trophic level to be as much, if not more, influential in determining fatty acid requirements of a species. As such, two feeding trials were conducted to determine …