Digital Commons Network^™

Toys Are For Adults, John Wippler

Theses

This paper explores the concept of toys, what they are and for whom they are made. The paper also provides a brief history of designer toys and pop culture, and how pop culture helped fuel the designer toy industry. The psychology of collecting is also referenced, and a direct correlation is made between the act of collecting toys and toy popularity.

The book I wrote is also mentioned and is a vital part of the purpose for the thesis. The book is an introductory guide to resin toymaking and is integral to the expansion of the designer toy community.

Molecular Evidence Of Cryptic Hybridization In The Japanese Nezasa Bamboos (Pleioblastus Section Nezasa), Ryan Long

Theses

The genus Pleioblastus is a complex group of Southeast Asian temperate bamboos with 7-21 species, depending on taxonomic authority. This study tests the hypothesis that taxonomic complexity in this group is due in part to hybridization and subsequent backcrossing in natural populations, resulting in a reticulate evolutionary history and a contemporary species assemblage that includes cryptic hybrids. This hypothesis is supported by recent research on the temperate bamboos that revealed intergeneric hybrids involving Pleioblastus and other genera of temperate bamboos (Triplett and Clark, 2021). The objective of the current study was to use data from Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) …

Numerical And Experimental Investigation Of Aerosol Jet Printing, Srikanthan Ramesh

Theses

Bacterial contamination of medical devices remains a threat to the success of many medical interventions. Oral administration of antibiotics is a convenient, non-invasive way to treat infections. Most orally administered drugs, however, encounter biochemical and biological barriers that reduce their bioavailability at the target site. Therefore, prophylactic physico- chemical changes of biomaterial surfaces are considered alternatives to inhibit bacterial aggregation and subsequent biofilm formation. Millions of years of evolution have enabled nature to develop micro-topographical surface features specifically designed to avoid bacterial attachment and colonization. Examples of such topographies can be seen on insect cuticles, plant leaves, and the feet …

Effects Of Dc Electric Field On Particle Transportation And Deposition In Evaporating Droplets, Akshay Pratap Singh

Theses

Microfluidics(uF) is the science of manipulating and controlling the fluids usually in the range of microliters (10-6L) to picolitres (10-12L). Physical parameters, such as surface tension and contact angle do not play a significant effect on macro scale but play a crucial role at the microscopic level. Microfluidics is viewed as an essential tool for life science research and flexible electronics. A deeper understanding of physical parameters of microfluidics would result in more efficient and lower cost devices (‘Lab-on-a-Chip’ devices) and foldable electronics. In short, the concepts of microfluidics can be used to reduce the cost, size, and ease of …

Tidal Disruption And Accretion Of Planets And Brown Dwarfs Inside Giant Stars, Gabriel Guidarelli

Theses

A significant fraction of isolated white dwarfs host strong magnetic fields that range from a few to a thousand Megagauss. These high-field magnetic white dwarfs (HFMWDs) comprise ∼10% of all isolated white dwarfs. Remarkably, not a single close and detached binary system that is composed of a white dwarf and a low-mass-main-sequence star contains a HFMWD. If the origin of magnetic fields in white dwarfs were independent of binary interactions, then the observed distribution of isolated white dwarfs should be similar to those in detached binaries, yet they are not. Unless there is a mechanism by which distant companions prevent …

Disaster Site Structure Analysis: Examining Effective Remote Sensing Techniques In Blue Tarpaulin Inspection, Madeline G. Miles

Theses

This thesis aimed to evaluate three methods of analyzing blue roofing tarpaulin (tarp) placed on homes in post natural disaster zones with remote sensing techniques by assessing the different methods- image segmentation, machine learning (ML), and supervised classification. One can determine which is the most efficient and accurate way of detecting blue tarps. The concept here was that using the most efficient and accurate way to locate blue tarps can aid federal, state, and local emergency management (EM) operations and homeowners. In the wake of a natural disaster such as a tornado, hurricane, thunderstorm, or similar weather events, roofs are …

Improving Asteroid Remote Sensing By Examining Past Martian Methods, James Dean King

Theses

Deep Space Remote Sensing is an ever-evolving field. The very first missions into deep space were explorations that utilized trial and error, as humanity faced a new frontier of unknowns. Over these 70 years of deep space exploration, much attention has been given to our three nearest celestial neighbors: the Moon, Venus, and Mars. Mars, in particular, has been the target of much observation and study due to it being a target for future colonization. Meanwhile, the areas beyond Mars have had comparatively less focus. Asteroids and objects beyond Mars offer many new horizons for humanity to study. By using …

Cryptic Hybridization In The Temperate Bamboos: Is Pleioblastus Simonii A Species Of Hybrid Origin?, Morgan Brown

Theses

Japanese river bamboo (Pleioblastus simonii, ‘medake,’‘kawadake’) is an ecologically important species of temperate bamboo native to Japan. This species is widely known and historically important in Japanese rural farm life. Based on morphological data, Japanese river bamboo is classified in Pleioblastus section Medakea (Poaceae: Bambusoideae) along with five other Japanese species, which are collectively considered to represent a phylogenetically distinct lineage. However, recent studies suggest that Japanese river bamboo may have arisen as a result of previously undetected hybridization (i.e., cryptic hybridization), while also calling into question the diversity of section Medakea. The role of hybridization in natural plant populations …

Alexander Calder And Studio Jewelry: Rethinking The Role Of The Decorative, Mandy Clark-Russell

Theses

Alexander Calder is best known for his monumental mobile sculptures. Firmly ensconced in mid-century modernism, Calder was highly influential for a number of other artists and movements between wars, especially Surrealism. Less known is that Calder was not only a sculptor, but also a jeweler. In fact, Calder’s work expanded from mobiles, stabiles, and sculptures into the world of studio jewelry as early as the 1930s. The recent revival of studio jewelry, coupled with increased attention of the artist due to record auction numbers, have begged a reconsideration of the role played by the “decorative” digressions of his oeuvre. Previously …

Christianity In Insular Artwork From The Seventh To Tenth Centuries, Alexandria White

Theses

With the birth and spread of Christianity to the British Isles, there was a fusion between the different cultures that existed on these islands that resulted in a style known as Insular Art. These cultures are the Scottish Picts, the Irish Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, the Welsh, and the Vikings. In examining several works of art from these different cultures in this paper, the syncretism of Insular Art will be explored. Their traditionally Pagan symbols were given new meanings from Christianity as it spread. Through the study of various symbols and iconography employed in this art style, the author will establish …

The Mindful App: Usability Report, Jocelyn Sands

Theses

Methodology

The primary focus of this research is looking at the effects of qualitative & quantitative methodologies during the creation of a user-centered designed application. Through this process, I conducted product research on applications currently on the market. I also conducted user interviews and surveys to understand user needs.

Research Process

Throughout this process, I have used qualitative and quantitative information to gain knowledge of what users may need while using this app. I used qualitative and quantitative methodology to screen participants by conducting testing in a variety of ways. This ensures users are able to effectively discuss their thoughts …

Never A Complete Success, Never A Complete Failure: Thomas Hirschhorn’S Commemoration Of Antonio Gramsci, Ryan March

Theses

This paper will analyze Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, examining the level of collaboration which took place among the participating community members. The Gramsci Monument is an artwork that took place in 2013 in the Forest Houses projects in the Bronx, New York. It was an artwork that functioned as a temporary community center, providing different facilities such as a library, radio station, computer lab, newspaper center, and art studio to local residents. Hirschhorn hired a team of residents to build this monument, which was made of everyday materials like plywood, recycled wood pallets, packing tape, and cardboard. While the artwork …

The Role Of Physical Geographic Features In Video Games, Dexter Ferguson

Theses

This thesis examines how physical geographic features affect individuals when interacting with video game environments. There are very few studies on the geography of video games. I aim to bridge the gap between game studies and geography, a naturally occurring link. The observation of elements such as the geography of an area is critical when exploring an individual’s perception of a video game environment. Individuals interact with the geography of their location on a day-to-day basis, whether it be physical or human geography; how they can relate a video game’s geography to the real world dramatically affects their immersion. An …

Safe Water For All: A Multi-Modal Approach To North Alabama's Water Resources, Elijah Walker

Theses

Environmental degradation is a destructive force produced by the human disturbance of pollution. It is a phenomenon that gradually evolves landscapes over time resulting in irreversible outcomes. Environmental degradation physically affects spaces’ resources, objects, and inhabiting humans. This study observes the impacts of pollution beyond physical boundaries and how it affects human identity/sense of place through the utilization of geographic information systems. Specifically, it examines cultural identity developed through human experiences and connections to landscapes containing water resources. Following, pollution contaminates water resources disrupting experiences and connections thus causing the cultural identity to disappear. The case study applied to this …

Graph Arrowing: Constructions And Complexity, Zohair Raza Hassan

Theses

Graph arrowing is concerned with determining which monochromatic subgraphs are unavoidable when coloring a given graph. There are two main avenues of research concerning arrowing: finding extremal Ramsey/Folkman graphs and categorizing the complexity of arrowing problems. Both avenues have been studied extensively for decades. In this thesis, we focus on graph arrowing problems where one of the monochromatic subgraphs being avoided is the path on three vertices, denoted as P3. Our main contributions involve computing Folkman numbers by generating graphs up to 13 vertices and proving the coNP-completeness of some arrowing problems using a novel reduction framework geared towards avoiding …

Performance Evaluation Of Minimum Quantity Lubrication (Mql) When Machining High-Performance Materials, Shafahat Ali

Theses

The manufacturing sector is among the fastest-growing in today's industrialized world. Manufacturers are concerned about increasing their competitiveness and profitability. Increasing the efficiency and sustainability of manufacturing processes is one way to improve productivity and improve profit margins. Learning about cutting conditions and how they affect machined surfaces and tool life can help improve productivity. Nowadays, the goal is not just to increase productivity but also to make processes more environmentally friendly and cleaner. This research aims to analyze the machinability of difficult-to-cut magnesium alloys through different cooling and lubrication strategies and their impact on the environment. This study conducted …

Learning Multi-Step Robotic Manipulation Tasks Through Visual Planning, Sulabh Kumra

Theses

Multi-step manipulation tasks in unstructured environments are extremely challenging for a robot to learn. Such tasks interlace high-level reasoning that consists of the expected states that can be attained to achieve an overall task and low-level reasoning that decides what actions will yield these states. A model-free deep reinforcement learning method is proposed to learn multi-step manipulation tasks. This work introduces a novel Generative Residual Convolutional Neural Network (GR-ConvNet) model that can generate robust antipodal grasps from n-channel image input at real-time speeds (20ms). The proposed model architecture achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy on three standard grasping datasets. The adaptability of …

Using Machine Learning In Disaster Tweets Classification, Humaid Alhammadi

Theses

People share real-time updates on social media platforms (i.e. Twitter) when disaster occurs, this information is very valuable for disaster relief and response teams as it can alert them immediately in order to prioritize tasks. Text mining and Machine learning algorithm can scan the huge generated unstructured data on social media platforms such as Twitter, to spot such information through keywords and phrases that refers to disasters. One challenge that the algorithm might face is whether a tweet text is talking about a real disaster or uses those keywords as a metaphor, which can lead to huge mislabeling of tweets. …

Chromium Modified Crystallization Of Silicon Thin Films Crystallized By Flash Lamp Annealing, Matthew Hum

Theses

Flash lamp annealing (FLA) is a method of quickly crystallizing large areas of amorphous silicon, which is a promising alternative to existing low-throughput laser annealing in the fabrication of low temperature polycrystalline silicon for thin film transistors in display applications [1]. However, FLA tends to promote dewetting of silicon and randomized void formation during melt-phase crystallization [2]. Chromium underlayers have been successfully used [3] to promote silicon adhesion in thicker films, but there are many potential interactions between Cr and Si, such as the formation of silicides and generation of electrical trap states, that may inhibit future transistor performance. The …

Text Analysis Of Airline Tweets, Essa Altamimi

Theses

By acting as a succinct summary, keywords and key phrases can be a useful tool for swiftly assessing enormous amounts of textual material. A "keyword" is defined as a "word that briefly and accurately characterises the subject, or an aspect of the subject, presented in a text," according to the International Encyclopaedia of Information and Library Science (Bolger et al., 1989) (Feather et al., 1996). People are more likely to complain when they are anxious, according to research (Bolger et al., 1989)(Meier et al., 2013), and moods are affected by time (Ryan et al., 2010). Due to this study, airlines …

Living, Breathing Data: Sharing And Interpreting Green Infrastructure Data To Promote Behavioral Change, Nick Stanek

Theses

Green infrastructure is a sustainable and climate resilient approach to urbanization that reduces the impact that we as humans have on our environment. Traditional impermeable infrastructure causes excessive stormwater runoff, which disrupts the nutrient balance and water properties of the surrounding watershed. Green infrastructure installments such as porous pavement, rain barrels, and green roofs provide various ecosystem services, and restore urban water quality. As communities shift to being more climate resilient, the responsibility to develop green infrastructure rests on individuals as well as institutions. The Rochester Museum & Science Center in Rochester, New York, has constructed a Green Infrastructure Showcase …

Unveiling Buried Agn In Oh Megamaser Galaxies, Liza Maria Matrecito Salcedo

Theses

Ultra-luminous/Luminous Infrared Galaxies, (U)LIRGS, dominate the bright end of the galaxy luminosity function in the nearby universe. They are preferentially found in gas-rich mergers and are known for hosting starbursts (SBs) and active galactic nuclei (AGN), frequently in the same system. Approximately 20\% of (U)LIRGS contain highly luminous hydroxyl masers (OHMs). This OHM emission can be used to trace galaxy merger rates and associated processes of the system. OHMs are produced by the amplification of a background radio continuum source and require high column densities of molecular gas and a source of IR pumping radiation. Both SBs and AGN contain …

Exploration Of The Use Of Digital Micromirror Devices For Highly Multiplexed Spectroscopy Applications In Astronomy, Kathleen Oram

Theses

Highly multiplexed spectroscopic capabilities are critical to future astronomy space missions. Such capabilities enable large samples of spectral data to be collected in an efficient manner. The individual mirrors of a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) can serve as slits in a multi-object spectrograph (MOS). This work explores several areas vital to the inclusion of DMDs in future astronomy missions: space qualification, optical performance, and the implementation of Hadamard Transform Spectral Imaging (HTSI). While DMDs were not designed for space, this work reports on testing that demonstrates that the devices can withstand the environmental conditions of a space mission. The optical …

Vertical Adaptive Reuse: Balancing The Past And Present, Jostin Sarmiento

Theses

Many countries like the United States are taking lands that are untouched and putting in new structures stripping away the natural beauty of the site. Structures that once thrived in the past lay in waste as society continues to move forward. Architecture can be used to revitalize abandoned historic structures keeping a balance between respecting the past while designing for the present and the future. This a design thesis that proposes to revive an existing structure by adding a vertical addition for the pedestrian to experience the past, present, and future while rising up.

Single-Input Signature Register-Based Time Delay Reservoir, David Pastuch

Theses

Machine learning continues to play a critical role in our society. The ability to automatically identify intricate relationships in large volumes of data has proven incredibly useful for problems such as automatic speech recognition and image processing. In particular, neural networks have become increasingly popular in a wide set of application domains, given their ability to solve complex problems and process high-dimensional data. However, the impressive performance of state-of-the-art neural networks comes at the cost of large area and power consumption for the computation resources used in training and inference. As a result, a growing area of research concerns hardware …

Robust L1-Norm Singular-Value Decomposition And Estimation, Duc H. Le

Theses

Singular-Value Decomposition (SVD) is a ubiquitous data analysis method in engineering, science, and statistics. Singular-value estimation, in particular, is of critical importance in an array of engineering applications, such as channel estimation in communication systems, EMG signal analysis, and image compression, to name just a few. Conventional SVD of a data matrix coincides with standard Principal-Component Analysis (PCA). The L2-norm (sum of squared values) formulation of PCA promotes peripheral data points and, thus, makes PCA sensitive against outliers. Naturally, SVD inherits this outlier sensitivity. In this work, we present a novel robust method for SVD based on a L1-norm (sum …

Impact Of Noise In Automatic Speech Recognition For Low-Resourced Languages, Vigneshwar Lakshminarayanan

Theses

The usage of deep learning algorithms has resulted in significant progress in auto- matic speech recognition (ASR). The ASR models may require over a thousand hours of speech data to accurately recognize the speech. There have been case studies that have indicated that there are certain factors like noise, acoustic distorting conditions, and voice quality that has affected the performance of speech recognition. In this research, we investigate the impact of noise on Automatic Speech Recognition and explore novel methods for developing noise-robust ASR models using the Tamil lan- guage dataset with limited resources. We are using the speech dataset …

Semi-Supervised Video And Image In-Painting, Rajiv Mandya Nagaraju

Theses

Human brain is inherently good at pattern recognition. AI researchers have always struggled to emulate such levels of performance in machine vision algorithms. Building as an extension of the pattern recognition, humans are also exceptional in selectively learning and bridging the gap when there is missing data. Even when the missing data is in complex images and videos formats. Human brain is able to surmise and comprehend the scene with reasonable certainty given enough contextual information. We believe that selective learning aids in selectively filling the missing data. To this end we experiment with partial convolutions, and the networks can …

Air-Deflected Microfluidic Chip For Characterization Of Fluid-Structure Interactions, Chad Ten Pas

Theses

Millions of people suffer from dentinal pain each year caused by a pressure change and fluid shear in the dentin tubule and nerve pulp system. Dentin is made up of mostly hydroxyapatite, a hard and opaque material. In-situ characterization is extremely challenging because of the tubules that run through are high-aspect ratio micropores with a feature size of 1-2 µm. Current studies have proven that various methods can be deployed to fabricate microscale geometry using PDMS. The most used methods are three-dimensional stereolithography, fused deposited material (FDM), 3D printed sacrificial mold, FDM 3D printed molds and soft lithography molding from …

Deep Feature Learning And Adaptation For Computer Vision, Abu Md Niamul Taufique

Theses

We are living in times when a revolution of deep learning is taking place. In general, deep learning models have a backbone that extracts features from the input data followed by task-specific layers, e.g. for classification. This dissertation proposes various deep feature extraction and adaptation methods to improve task-specific learning, such as visual re-identification, tracking, and domain adaptation. The vehicle re-identification (VRID) task requires identifying a given vehicle among a set of vehicles under variations in viewpoint, illumination, partial occlusion, and background clutter. We propose a novel local graph aggregation module for feature extraction to improve VRID performance. We also …