Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring English Teachers’ Views On Their Kindergarten Emergent Writing Practices: A Mixed Method Study, Asma Yousef Al Raeesi

Theses

This study aimed at exploring English teachers’ views on the emergent writing practices of kindergarten students. An exploratory sequential mixed method design was adopted by employing qualitative and quantitative means. In the first phase, five kindergarten teachers were selected purposively and interviewed using semi-structured interviews. The results extracted from the qualitative phase served in developing the quantitative tool. The second phase which featured a collection of quantitative data by means of a questionnaire which was distributed randomly to kindergarten teachers in all school districts in the UAE (n=210). The results gleaned from both the qualitative and the quantitative …

A New Green Composite Based On Polylactic Acid Mixed With Biomass From Uae Date Palm Waste For Cutlery And Food Packaging Applications, Noran Hussein Awad Elsayed Mousa

Theses

Petroleum-based plastic cutlery is widely used and due to its non-biodegradable properties, they cause serious threats to the environment. Therefore, there is a need to fabricate such products from biodegradable material. Date Palm Rachis (DPR) waste was used as a filler in three levels of 30 wt%, 40 wt% and 50 wt% for cost-performance optimization balance and to improve the thermal behaviours of the biodegradable Polylactic Acid (PLA). The preparation of biodegradable PLA/date palm waste composites was done using a melt mixing extruder at 180°C by varying parameters such as mixing time, the composition of date palm waste biomass, biomass …

Development Of Supramolecular Multicomponent Chromophores Towards Photoluminescence Switches, Rukayat Shola Bojesomo

Theses

A new fluorescent dye (4PBZC) comprises of coumarin (C), piperazine (P), and benzimidazole (BZ) was designed, prepared, and complexed to cucurbit[7]uril (CB7) to detect carnosol (CAR), an anti-breast cancer drug, in sub-nanomolar concentrations utilizing the supramolecular indicator displacement assay (IDA) strategy, the CB7-assisted pK_a shift and the CB7-retarded photoinduced electron transfer (PET) process. The host−guest complexation was confirmed by UV−visible absorption, fluorescence, and proton NMR spectroscopy, which confirm binding to 4PBZC via the BZ moiety. Also, CB7 preferentially binds the indicator dye via the protonated BZ residue compared to the neutral BZ one, demonstrated by a higher binding …

Green Synthesis, Characterization, Antioxidant And Anticancer Activities Of Silver Nanoparticle Using Moringa Peregrina Leaf Extract, Khaled Saeed Al Baloushi

Theses

The sustainable green synthesis process for the development of environment-friendly, toxicant-free and biocompatible nanoparticles establishes important aspects in nanotechnology research. Even though; nanoparticles can be produced by either conventional physical and chemical or green synthesis, synthesizing nanoparticles using plant extracts as reducing and capping agents is acceptable. The benefits of plant extract mediated synthesis of silver nanoparticles comprise economic viability, quick synthesis, toxicity free, cost-effectiveness and large scale synthesis. In that way, the aqueous extract of Moringa peregrina leaves was used to synthesizes silver nanoparticles. The silver nanoparticles were characterized by various spectral studies including FT-IR, SEM, HR-TEM and XRD. …

Synthesis, Characterization, Electronic Structure Of Biocl/Biobr/Rgo Ternary Heterojunction And Its Photocatalytic Activities, Salama Yousef Alismaail

Theses

Solar energy is free, most abundant among all renewable energy sources. Energy from the sun reaches the earth surface at a rate of 1.2 X 10⁵ TW by far, exceeding the current world energy consumption of 17 TW (1TW = 10¹² J/s). Accordingly, development of visible light driven photocatalysts is of considerable interest in clean and renewable energy, as well as in wastewater treatment.

In that context, BiOCl and BiOBr and three different mole ratio composites were prepared, characterized using UV-vis DRS, PXRD, BET, SEM, and EDX and their photocatalytic activity for the photoreduction of 4-NA was evaluated. …

Impact Of Different Environmental Conditions On The Thermo-Mechanical Characteristics Of Compacted And Non-Compacted Carbon/Epoxy Plain Weave Woven Laminated Composites, Maryam Hamad Helal Thabet Al Kuwaiti

Theses

Fibre-reinforced polymeric composites used for aerospace applications are subjected to different environmental conditions during their operational life, such as moisture and temperature, which can adversely affect their performance over time. On the other hand, the standard fabrication process of these composite aircraft components requires a certain level of in-process vacuum compaction during the composite lay-up process to ensure the escape of entrapped air between the composite layers to prevent the formation of voids, through the application of bleeders/breathers around the composite laminate known for creating a channel for air to escape through. The aim of this study is to evaluate …

Mass Spectrometric Determination Of Retinol In Emirati Population, Israa Samir Mohamed Shawky El-Konaissi

Theses

This thesis is concerned with analyzing vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A is crucial for several functions, including vision, growth, and cell differentiation. the main aim is to develop and validate an LC-MS/MS method for the determination of vitamin A in plasma matrix and use the new method for the determination of vitamin A levels in the obese Emirati population. Methods: A positive ion electrospray ionisation (ESI) LC-MS/MS method was used in the Multiple Reaction Monitoring (MRM) mode for quantification. It involved i) LC-MS/MS, ii) a guard column together with C18 Ascentis Express F5 column iii) Internal standard, 25-Hydroxyvitamin D3 (6, …

Exploring The Effectiveness Of Using Guided Reading Approach On Promoting Arab Eighth Graders’ English Reading Fluency, Rasha Moustafa Afandy

Theses

This study aimed at exploring the effect of the guided reading approach on promoting reading fluency skills for middle school students. An explanatory mixed-method design was employed to achieve the purpose of this study. The quantitative phase of the study featured a pre and post-test after the implementation of a guided reading program for six weeks. The qualitative phase of the study featured by a collection of documents of evaluations which were conducted biweekly during the implementation of the program. These evaluative checklists were used to measure the students’ progress in reading fluency skills. The participants of this study were …

Studying The Impact Of Urban Densification On Social Sustainability: The Case Of Bida Bin Ammar Neighborhood In Al Ain, Uae, Lubna Mohammad Ghaffar Shekfa

Theses

As cities are under the influence of rapid development, industrialization, modernization, and globalization, a key task for local authorities, urban planners, and residents are to understand what makes a neighbourhood socially sustainable. In Al Ain City in the UAE, urban sprawl has been a persistent sustainability problem caused by low urban density and has led to the heavy reliance on private cars. To overcome this problem, urban densification as a sustainable planning approach is recommended. Al Ain 2030 Plan has adopted this approach for the redevelopment of the Asharej District. This research aims at studying the application of urban densification …

أحكام المؤسسة الفرديَّة وإشكالاتها العمليَّة في القانون الإماراتي, عبدالله حسن أحمد الحمادي

Theses

سعت هذه الإطروحة إلى إظهار حقيقة المؤسسة الفردية في النظام القانوني الإماراتي وإشكالاتها العملية في القانون الإماراتي، وفي سبيل ذلك تم دراسة التطور التاريخي لفكرة المؤسسة الفردية في دولة الإمارات على المستوى المحلي والاتحادي، لاستخلاص الملامح التشريعية التي قامت عليها فكرة المؤسسة الفردية في دولة الإمارات والنتائج المترتبة عليها، والتي من أهمها نظام وكيل الخدمات، هذا النظام الذي ارتبط بفكرة الصورية، والتي تعد من أهم الإشكاليات التي يواجهها القضاء الإماراتي، لما تخلف ه من آثار سلبية ومشكلات في الواقع العملي، ولتحقيق دراسة متكاملة عن الإشكاليات العملية لأحكام المؤسسة الفردية، تم دراسة ماهية المؤسسة الفردية وأساسها التشريعي، للوقوف على حقيقة المؤسسة …

Nurse Staffing And Quality Care In Long-Term Care Nursing Facilities: Differences In Rural And Urban Settings, Dorcas E. Kunkel

Theses

Public and congressional concern induced the Institute of Medicine (1996) to recommend increasing registered nurse (RN) staffing levels in nursing homes (NHs) to improve quality of care. The purpose of this study was to answer the question, does the relationship between nurse staffing in long term care nursing facilities and bladder and bowel incontinence for low risk nursing home residents differ by nursing facilities located in rural and urban settings? This study used a secondary database that included aggregate data of all 615 NHs in Minnesota, South and North Dakota including nurse staffing levels, facility descriptives, and the quality measure …

On Learning And Generalization To Solve Inverse Problem Of Electrophysiological Imaging, Sandesh Ghimire

Theses

In this dissertation, we are interested in solving a linear inverse problem: inverse electrophysiological (EP) imaging, where our objective is to computationally reconstruct personalized cardiac electrical signals based on body surface electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. EP imaging has shown promise in the diagnosis and treatment planning of cardiac dysfunctions such as atrial flutter, atrial fibrillation, ischemia, infarction and ventricular arrhythmia.

Towards this goal, we frame it as a problem of learning a function from the domain of measurements to signals. Depending upon the assumptions, we present two classes of solutions: 1) Bayesian inference in a probabilistic graphical model, 2) Learning from …

Vintage Fashion Line, Robyn Denise Grier

Theses

This project focuses is on the history, description and current trends of lingerie fashion. The goal is to create a vintage fashion line that would appeal to today’s woman. The project not only reviews historical fashion, but looks at current lingerie fashion trends and lingerie companies.

Exploring Strategies For Optimal Student Engagement Within A Blended Learning Model, Peter Repp

Theses

This project asks how percussion student engagement might be optimized through the integration of a blended course format. Using the “practical action research” methodology, various strategies for increasing student engagement were researched and implemented. The research focused on three components of student engagement, including: 1.) cognitive investment, 2.) active participation, and 3.) emotional commitment. As a result, an innovative percussion curriculum was created which provided significantly increased opportunity for teachers to focus on these factors by utilizing a blended model of instruction.

Integrating All Mobility Systems To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Nasser Al Suwaidi

Theses

The problem of traffic congestion is common in most urban areas with associated negative impact on the social, economic, and ecological well-being of its residents. Traffic congestion is a common phenomenon in the city of Dubai with its large population and high rate of car ownership. To tackle the problem, this study looks at integrating all mobility systems in the city as a possible solution to the traffic congestion menace. The research methodology involves thematic analysis of secondary data on the subject derived from online databases and libraries. The thematic analysis revealed that Dubai had all the factors needed to …

Developing Circular Economy Through Implementing Advanced Technologies In Dubai, Hana Alsuwaidi

Theses

The UAE and Dubai have made several strides towards sustainability and in recent years Circular Economy started to be recognised in the region. It is crucial to understand that Circular Economy is not only connected to recycling municipal waste. Circular Economy is a strategy that intends to be implemented as a business model across all industries through technological advancements. First, a conceptual and theoretical framework is developed through data analytics to indicates what are the barriers that slows any economy form implementing Circular Economy, how can Circular Economy strategy be developed in Dubai through implementing technological advancements. Secondly, a wide …

Mend Magazine: Creating Awareness. Shifting Habits Of Consumption., Marie A. Fabozzi

Theses

Generation Y, or more commonly known as Millennials (born from 1981-1996) seamlessly blend the digital realm with the physical world, as a result of adolescence in a time when technology was adopted early on (Dimock, 2019 & Fromm et al, 2013). Research shows that millennials want constant participation and interactivity to be personally engaged and that millennials are a largely influential, specifically with family members (Fromm et al, 2013 and Lu et al, 2013). Combining the Millennial generation's leverage with the topic of climate crisis there is opportunity for current and future generations to establish better habits early on. By …

Tree-Based Hardware Recursion For Divide-And-Conquer Algorithms, Braeden Morrison

Theses

It is well-known that custom hardware accelerators implemented as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can solve many problems much faster than software running on a central processing unit (CPU). This is because FPGAs and ASICs can have handcrafted data and control paths which exploit parallelism in ways that CPUs cannot. However, designing custom hardware is complicated and implementing algorithms in a way that takes advantage of the desired parallelism can be difficult. One class of algorithms that exemplifies this is divide-and-conquer algorithms.

A divide-and-conquer algorithm is a type of recursive algorithm that solves a problem …

Bx | Branded Ar Filters: Redefining Branded Interactions, Moses Michael Araujo

Theses

Traditional forms of experiential marketing have been interrupted by augmented reality. As augmented reality continues to grow, a new ecosystem for brand interactions has revealed a world of branded augmented content or “BX”. BX is a concept design that creates a personalized, immersive connection between brand and user through four AR filters.

Housing Occupants’ Motivational Drivers For Energy-Savings In The United Arab Emirates: An Exploratory Study, Monaya Muhammed Syam

Theses

The fast urbanization in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) accounts for 70% of energy consumption with the residential sector leading the way, urgently calling for mitigating strategies. Energy-efficient housing in hot climates has been extensively researched in terms of design, building materials and systems. However, an energy performance gap subsides as a direct result of occupants’ behaviour, catalyzing focused research. Moreover, understanding the housing occupants’ behaviour, motivation, and impetus to save energy proved to significantly increase energy savings. Exploring this topic in the UAE is vital given its distinctive specifics; fast-growing economy, harsh hot climate, and heterogeneous population. The latter …

A Process Modeling Approach To Evaluating Worker Requirements For Sexual Assault Evidence Testing, Arden Bonzo

Theses

In recent years, over 100,000 untested sexual assault kits (SAKs) have been discovered in the custody of law enforcement and awaiting testing at publicly funded facilities. The backlog has been attributed to law enforcement discretion and a lack of resources at testing facilities. In response to the backlog, states have adopted various policies for testing SAKs. 11 states have adopted comprehensive policies, mandating testing of all backlogged and incoming kits, in addition to annual inventories, updated tracking systems, and increased funding for testing programs. 30 states have adopted “limited” policies and 4 states have proposed policy reforms. This research attempts …

New Approaches For Isolation And Characterization Of Extracellular Vesicles, Mehdi Dehghani

Theses

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane vesicles secreted by cells and distributed widely in all biofluids. Extracellular vesicles can modulate the biological activities of the recipient cells. Due to their role in intercellular communication, they are receiving attention for therapeutic and diagnostic applications. The first step to better understand EVs and to utilize them as therapeutic and diagnostic tools is to purify them from a variety of biofluids. Membranes have been extensively used for purification of different biological species from biological fluids. As the first aim, a novel microfluidic system, termed as tangential flow for analyte capture (TFAC) was developed to …

Towards Effectiveness Of Detecting Iot Botnet Attacks Using Supervised Machine Learning, Khizer Naeem

Theses

With the rapid explosion of Internet of Things (IoT), IoT enabled devices have reached every corner of the globe, connecting billions of devices to the global internet. Botnets remain as one that can profit the most from IoT security susceptibility among other threats. Machine Learning based techniques to detect malicious traffic has been a widely researched topic in the last few years. Most of the studies simply use these techniques in an isolated fashion, where the machine learning algorithms are trained and tested on the same stream of labeled traffic. This study will attempt to analyze the use of supervised …

Nation Branding And The Case Of Saudi Vision 2030 And The Use Of Twitter, Hala Zayed Alsaaidi

Theses

Nation branding has played a pivotal role in how Saudi Arabia represents itself in the global community. This thesis analyzed Saudi Arabia’s government approach towards the implementation of a nation branding strategy using social media as a vehicle to engage with the rest of the world. The study addresses questions of how Saudi Arabia communicates through nation branding as part of its core identity and how different values are presented in the Saudi Arabia Vision 2030 on Twitter. Qualitative content analysis was used to analayze the tweets and tweet contents regarding the Vision 2030 national branding in Saudi Arabia. Data …

Self-Admitted Technical Debt - An Investigation From Farm To Table To Refactoring, Ben Christians

Theses

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a metaphorical concept which describes the self-documented contribution of technical debt to a software project in the manner of source-code comments.

SATD can linger in projects and degrade source-code quality, but its palpable visibility draws a peculiar sort of attention from developers.

There is a need to understand the significance of engineering SATD within a software project, as these debts may have lurking repercussions.

While the oft-performed action of refactoring may work against a generalized volume of source code degradation, there exists only slight evidence suggesting that the act of refactoring has a distinct impact …

Energy Efficient Neocortex-Inspired Systems With On-Device Learning, Abdullah M. Zyarah

Theses

Shifting the compute workloads from cloud toward edge devices can significantly improve the overall latency for inference and learning. On the contrary this paradigm shift exacerbates the resource constraints on the edge devices. Neuromorphic computing architectures, inspired by the neural processes, are natural substrates for edge devices. They offer co-located memory, in-situ training, energy efficiency, high memory density, and compute capacity in a small form factor. Owing to these features, in the recent past, there has been a rapid proliferation of hybrid CMOS/Memristor neuromorphic computing systems. However, most of these systems offer limited plasticity, target either spatial or temporal input …

Effective Activation Functions For Homomorphic Evaluation Of Deep Neural Networks, Srinath Obla

Theses

CryptoNets and subsequent work have demonstrated the capability of homomorphic encryption (HE) in the applications of private artificial intelligence (AI). While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are primarily composed of linear functions which can be homomorphically evaluated, layers such as the activation layer are non-linear and cannot be homomorphically evaluated. One of the most commonly used alternatives is approximating these non-linear functions using low-degree polynomials. However, it is difficult to generate efficient approximations and often, dataset specific improvements are required. This thesis presents a systematic method to construct HE-friendly activation functions for CNNs. We first determine the key properties in a …

The Use Of Deep Learning Methods To Assist In The Classification Of Seismically Vulnerable Dwellings, Salman Khan

Theses

Exciting research is being conducted using Google's Street View imagery. Researchers can have access to training data that allows CNN training for topics ranging from assessing neighborhood environments to estimating the age of a building. However, due to the uncontrolled nature of imagery available via Google's Street View API, data collection can be lengthy and tedious. In an effort to help researchers gather address specific dwelling images efficiently, we developed an innovative and novel way of automatically performing this task. It was accomplished by exploiting Google's publicly available platform with a combination of 3 separate network types and post-processing techniques. …

Diving Into One’S Painful Past And Darkest Internal Fears: The Developmental Process Of The Thread That Snapped, Austin Brian Harrison

Theses

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OFAustin Harrison, for the Master of Fine Arts degree in Theatre, presented on April 10, 2020, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: DIVING INTO ONE’S PAINFUL PAST AND DARKEST INTERNAL FEARS: THE DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS OF THE THREAD THAT SNAPPEDMAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Jacob Juntunen This thesis details the development of my full-length play The Thread That Snapped from its early conception in 2019 to full production at Southern Illinois University Department of Theatre’s Christian H. Moe Theatre’s space in March 2020. In writing The Thread That Snapped, I was inspired by traumatic chapters within my life …

Development Of Frenet-Serret Frame And The Apollonian Window, Syeda Fareeza Karimushan

Theses

The present study focuses on developing a Frenet-Serret frame and the Apollonian Window. In the first part of the study Apollonian disks are generated for first four generations by developing visual basic codes in excel. For the second part of the study, three orthonormal basis vectors, namely, tangent, normal, and binormal vectors have been calculated for the tangent points of Apollonian discs for the first three generations. Equations of the Normal, Osculating and Rectifying planes and Taylor Series approximation have been calculated for specific theta. Because Apollonian Window consists of planar curves with constant curvature, torsion is nowhere present. The …