Digital Commons Network^™

Solid State Aircraft Concept Overview, M. Shahinpoor, P. Jenkins, C. Smith, Kakkattukuzhy M. Isaac, T. Dalbello, Anthony Colozza

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Due to recent advances in polymers, photovoltaics, and batteries a unique type of aircraft may be feasible. This is a "solid-state" aircraft, with no conventional mechanical moving parts. Airfoil, propulsion, energy production, energy storage and control are combined in an integrated structure. The key material of this concept is an ionic polymeric-metal composite (IPMC) that provides source of control and propulsion. This material has the unique capability of deforming in an electric field and returning to its original shape when the field is removed. Combining the IPMC with thin-film batteries and thin-film photovoltaics provides both energy source and storage in …

Sources Of Stress And Its Impact On Health Behaviors And Academic Performance Of International Students At The University Of Northern Iowa, Israel Gabriel Msengi

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

International students travel from their home countries in search of continuing education abroad without expectations that they will encounter stress. However, upon arriving at American college and university campuses, international students start noting differences with their respective countries. Challenges start developing related to a range of issues including language difficulties, immigration, and cultural shock/alienation concerns which, if not dealt with promptly, might impede their health behaviors and academic performance. This study investigated sources of stress and its impact on academic performance and health behaviors of international students at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). Investigated also were coping strategies that …

Relationship Of Effective Serve Reception Passing To Side Out Offense In Iowa City West Volleyball Matches, Craig A. Pitcher

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this study was to indicate the relationship of effective serve reception to side out offense in Iowa City West volleyball matches. Subjects were member of the 2002 Iowa City West varsity volleyball team. Iowa City West volleyball team was selected for the study based on availability of game tapes throughout the 2002 season. All taped varsity matches were viewed for the study analysis. All reception passes were given a pass value of three, two, one, or zero. Each pass was also categorized into offensive outcomes, kill, play on, or error. The results of the Person correlation test …

Sport Nutrition Education: A Study Of Nutritional Practices And Knowledge Among Mississippi Valley Conference High School Athletic Programs In The State Of Iowa, Sara Lynn Hallgren

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

High school athletes are becoming more involved in nutritional supplementation and including foods in their diet high in fat and sugar through increased consumption of "convenience foods" and fast-food. These poor eating behaviors and use of supplementation are reasons why it is becoming increasingly important to bring sport nutrition education to the high school level. It is imperative these athletes receive appropriate education needed to make educated choices about food selections to meet nutritional needs for their sport and development. The purpose of this study is to determine the status of sport nutrition education among Mississippi Valley Conference high school …

Herbal Dietary Supplement Education In Midwestern Medical Schools, Wendi Suzanne Sobaski

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In the past decade dietary supplement sales have nearly doubled. This dramatic increase in supplement use stems from the passing of Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA). The DSHEA tied the Food and Drug Administration's hands from regulating dietary supplements. Therefore these chemical entities which act like pharmaceuticals in many ways are being created, manufactured, and sold without standardized safety testing. Wide availability, cost effectiveness, and claims by supplement manufacturers to treat serious ailments make supplements, especially herbal products, an appealing alternative to traditional medical practice. Manufacturers' claims often times confuse consumers and leave the consumer searching …

A Guide For Standards-Based, Interdisciplinary, Elementary Art Activities For Cultural Institutions, Carolyn L. W. Carpenter

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this research is to provide a guide for educators in cultural institutions to develop interdisciplinary programs that meet the national education standards, using meaningful objects from their collections and hands-on art experiences for grades K-5. A survey by the Iowa Museum Association (heretofore to be referred to as IMA) provides justification for this research. The survey was presented at the IMA/NMA (Nebraska Museum Association) Annual Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, in October 2002. The survey gives a synopsis of the educational programming and staffing in over 140 cultural institutions of Iowa. The results reveal a number of areas …

Protecting Us From Pictures: Gender And Support For Legal Restrictions On Pornography, Elizabeth Lynne Chivers

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Research and debate concerning pornography has been controversial, primarily focusing on the perceived harmful effects. The current study addresses support for legal restrictions and the effect of gender on this support. Based on the internalization of gender roles, perspectives, and identities through socialization, gender is constructed differently for men and women. Because this socialization is constructed around an oppositional male-female dichotomy, men and women experience the world differently. While there have been previous research addressing gender differences, the gendered nature of attitudes merits further study. The current study is based on data collected for 451 undergraduate students at the University …

Dig Deep: From Down Under, So Shall I Emerge, Lori Ann Dale

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

"Dig Deep: From Down Under So Shall I Emerge" is a celebration of who I am; culturally, spiritually, and historically. This body of ceramic sculptures, inclusive of five connected works, has allowed me to better understand myself, my surroundings, and my purpose in life. Through talking to other African American women my age, I have come to realize we are all dealing with similar feelings of displacement. Some stereotypes rooted in oppression have depicted Black Women as being loud angry and having negative attitudes. So being aware of such stereotypes, in the presence of other cultures many Black Women find …

Cmc Interpersonal Relationships: A Phenomenological Study Of Online Relational Stages, Traci Mccollom Dillavou

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Initiating and developing Internet interpersonal relationships is becoming increasingly popular as technology becomes more relevant and available. In fact, according the Pew Internet and American Life Project (PIALP) (1995) and IntelliQuest (1999), which monitors the penetration, use and appreciation of media in society, the number of Americans online increased from twenty-five million in 1995 to eighty-three million in 1999, an increase of nearly 60 million American onliners in 4 years. More recently, about 106 million American adults have used the Internet; in addition 73 percent of all American young adults between the ages of 12 and 17 have also used …

Latin American Resistance Movements In The Time Of The Posts, Glen Kuecker

History Faculty publications

This article examines the flood of resistance movements in today’s Latin America. It places them in the context of the great economic changes that have swept the world since the end of the Cold War, what is often called “globalization.” Analysis focuses on the “newness” of our contemporary period, especially the importance of the transnational political and economic order. This essay illustrates how social scientists attempt to understand this moment of change, and emphasizes the limitations to their theory. Special emphasis is on the utility of New Social Movement theory as a tool for understanding today’s resistance movements as well …

The State Of Public Speaking Courses In Japanese Colleges, Shoko Hayashi

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this study is to reveal the state of public speaking courses in Japan. The survey was conducted as a heuristic study for future Japanese Communication Education. Six out of 80 Japanese universities or colleges participated in this survey. The sample included two private universities, two private colleges which were classified as intensive language schools, one private college which was an intensive business school and one university or college that did not indicate what kind of school it was. The three categorized data was gathered ; "Demographic Data," "the Definition of Public Speaking Course in Japan" and "Orientations …

A Case Study Of A Child Presenting Reading/Writing And Behavioral Difficulties, John Daniel Warrington

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this case study/case history was to explore one individual thoroughly in order to develop a more specific appreciation and understanding of what has occurred throughout that person's life. This deeper understanding of lvan's life history is likely to enable the researcher to identify both helpful interventions and structures that are currently in place for him and those that should be built upon or redesigned within the current school and/or home settings. Ivan has experienced significant struggles in both academic and behavioral performance for many years now. He is nearing the end of his formalized educational experience as …

Protecting Us From Pictures : Gender And Support For Legal Restrictions On Pornography, Elizabeth Lynne Chivers

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Research and debate concerning pornography has been controversial, primarily focusing on the perceived harmful effects. The current study addresses support for legal restrictions and the effect of gender on this support. Based on the internalization of gender roles, perspectives, and identities through socialization, gender is constructed differently for men and women. Because this socialization is constructed around an oppositional male-female dichotomy, men and women experience the world differently. While there have been previous research addressing gender differences, the gendered nature of attitudes merits further study.

The current study is based on data collected for 451 undergraduate students at the University …

Study Of Structural And Magnetic Properties Of Iron-Rich Mixed Rare-Earth Nddyfe (17-Y-X)Coxsiy Compounds, Kishore Kamaraju, Jinbo Yang, William B. Yelon, Oran Allan Pringle, M. S. Kim, Qingsheng Cai, William Joseph James

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

A series of NdDyFe(17-y-x)CoxSiy solid solutions with = 2 and 3 and = 0.5 1.0 and 1.5 were prepared by induction melting stoichiometric amounts of high-purity elements. The postannealed samples consist of two phases belonging to the space groups R3 m and P63 mmc . The lattice parameters and the unit cell volumes were calculated from the refinements of the magnetic and structural unit cells using the FULLPROF version of the Rietveld program. For a fixed content of Co, the maximum Curie temperatures (305 C to 405 C) were observed in samples with = 1 and having two phases, a …

The Teacher-Student Relationship: Managing Dialectical Tensions And Their Impact On The Classroom Environment, Lori L. Johnson

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In this study, I suggest that teachers and students have opportunities to develop and maintain relationships. It is my belief that learning happens within these relationships. This ethnographic study examined dialectical tensions within the teacher-student relationship. Relational dialectics theory suggests that relationships are characterized by ongoing tensions and the ways in which these tensions are managed dictates relational life. The concept of tension simply refers to the ongoing, ever-changing interaction between unified opposites, such as the tension of independence-dependence. In this study, I examined if tensions were visible, how they were managed through interactions, and possible effects on the classroom …

Validation Of The Suicide Resilience Inventory-25 (Sri-25) With African American College Students, James Corye Johnson

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Suicide behavior has increased over the last several years in the 15-24 year old age group. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), in 1999, suicide was the 11th leading cause of death in the United States. There are substantial ethnic group differences in the rates of suicide for adults and adolescents. In both adults and adolescents, African Americans have the lowest rates of suicide in the United States of any other ethnic group. Resiliency behaviors are behaviors/protective factors that buffer individuals who are at risk for suicidal behaviors. This study was designed to examine whether ethnic group …

Assessing The Applicability Of Traditional Urban Transportation Planning Methods For The University Campus: A Case Study Of The University Of Northern Iowa, Jess Douglas Elder

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The development of methods that estimate travel demand and predict travel behavior is among the most significant advances in urban planning. The traditional transportation model has four steps: trip generation, trip distribution, mode choice, and trip assignment. This four-step model (FSM) encompasses an evolving methodology that determines the origin and destination, method of travel, and chosen route of each traveler. The focus of this project is to apply this methodology to analyze travel patterns associated with a university, specifically the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). A survey of faculty, staff, and students was conducted to generate data on UNI travel …

Interactive Dna Sequence And Structure Design For Dna Nanoapplications, Mingjun Zhang, Chaman Sabharwal, Weimin Tao, Tzyh-Jong Tarn, Ning Xi, Guangyong Li

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

DNA sequence and structure design is very important for DNA nanoapplications. A computer-aided design tool is needed for exploring DNA sequence and structure of interests before experimental synthesis, which is a time- and labor-consuming process. In this paper, an interactive DNA sequence and structure design software tool called DNA shop is proposed and implemented. The visualization tool can generate DNA structures by specifying, selecting, and moving DNA sequences around and display corresponding structures. Using the tool, DNA sequence and structure can be visually inspected in three-dimensional space before experimental studies.

2,4-Dinitrophenylhydrazones Of 2,4-Dihydroxybenzaldehyde, 2,4-Dihydroxyacetophenone And 2,4-Dihydroxybenzophenone, Russell G. Baughman, Kenneth L. Martin, Rajendra K. Singh, James O. Stoffer

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

In 2,4-dihydroxybenzaldehyde 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazone N,N-dimethylformamide solvate (or 4-[(2,4-dinitrophenyl)-hydrazonomethyl]benzene-1,3-diol N,N-dimethylformamide solvate

Laboratory Automation Curriculum At Keck Graduate Institute, James D. Sterling

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel curriculum in laboratory automation and high-throughput technologies has been developed at the Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) over the past five years as part of the professional master's degree program in applied life sciences. The goal of this curriculum has been four-fold: (1) motivate study by describing the need for automation through several example problems in combinatorial biological discovery, (2) provide elements of fundamental engineering science that are required for the development of the technologies and tools that enable automation, (3) provide opportunities for the students to see and use state-of-the-art instruments, learn about existing industry standards, and to …

Robust Near-Field Adaptive Beamforming With Distance Discrimination, Y. Rosa Zheng, M. El-Tanany, R. A. Goubran

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper proposes a robust near-field adaptive beamformer for microphone array applications in small rooms. Robustness against location errors is crucial for near-field adaptive beamforming due to the difficulty in estimating near-field signal locations especially the radial distances. A near-field regionally constrained adaptive beamformer is proposed to design a set of linear constraints by filtering on a low rank subspace of the near-field signal over a spatial region and frequency band such that the beamformer response over the designed spatial-temporal region can be accurately controlled by a small number of linear constraint vectors. The proposed constraint design method is a …

Robust Resource Allocation For Sensor-Actuator Distributed Computing Systems, Shoukat Ali, Jong-Kook Kim, A. A. Maciejewski, Howard Jay Siegel

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This research investigates two distinct issues related to a resource allocation: its robustness and the failure rate of the heuristic used to determine the allocation. The target system consists of a number of sensors feeding a set of heterogeneous applications continuously executing on a set of heterogeneous machines connected together by high-speed heterogeneous links. There are number of quality of service (QoS) constraints that must be satisfied. A heuristic failure occurs if the heuristic cannot find an allocation that allows the system to meet its QoS constraints. The system is expected to operate in an uncertain environment where the workload, …

The Robustness Of Resource Allocation In Parallel And Distributed Computing Systems, Shoukat Ali, Howard Jay Siegel, A. A. Maciejewski

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper gives an overview of the material to be discussed in the invited keynote presentation by H. J. Siegel. Performing computing and communication tasks on parallel and distributed systems involves the coordinated use of different types of machines, networks, interfaces, and other resources. Decisions about how best to allocate resources are often based on estimated values of task and system parameters, due to uncertainties in the system environment. An important research problem is the development of resource management strategies that can guarantee a particular system performance given such uncertainties. We have designed a methodology for deriving the degree of …

Unmanned Vehicle Navigation Using Swarm Intelligence, Sheetal Doctor, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Unmanned vehicles are used to explore physical areas where humans are unable to go due to different constraints. There have been various algorithms that have been used to perform this task. This paper explores swarm intelligence for searching a given problem space for a particular target(s). The work in this paper has two parts. In the first part, a set of randomized unmanned vehicles are deployed to locate a single target. In the second part, the randomized unmanned vehicles are deployed to locate various targets and are then converged at one of targets of a particular interest. Each of the …

A Distributed Power Control Mac Protocol For Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks., Maciej Jan Zawodniok, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel distributed power control (DPC)⋅ scheme and a MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks in the presence of radio channel uncertainties such as path loss, Shadowing and Rayleigh fading is presented. The DPC quickly estimates the time-varying nature of the channel and uses the information to select a suitable transmitter power value in order to maintain a target Signal-to-Interference ratio (SIR) at the receiver. The standard assumption of a constant interference during a link's power update used in other works is relaxed. The performance of the proposed DPC is demonstrated analytically. The power used for all RTS-CTS-DATA-ACK frames …

A Taxonomy Of Network Computing Systems, Muthucumaru Maheswaran, Shoukat Ali

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Rapid advances in networking and microprocessor technologies have led to the emergence of Internet-wide distributed computing systems ranging from simple LAN-based clusters to planetary-scale networks. As these network computing systems evolve by combining the best features of existing systems, differences among NCs are blurring. To address this problem, researchers have proposed formal taxonomies of NC systems. We propose a new taxonomy that is both broad enough to encompass all NC systems and simple enough to be widely used.

Adaptive Critic Neural Network-Based Object Grasping Control Using A Three-Finger Gripper, Gustavo Galan, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Grasping of objects has been a challenging task for robots. The complex grasping task can be defined as object contact control and manipulation subtasks. In this paper, object contact control subtask is defined as the ability to follow a trajectory accurately by the fingers of a gripper. The object manipulation subtask is defined in terms of maintaining a predefined applied force by the fingers on the object. A sophisticated controller is necessary since the process of grasping an object without a priori knowledge of the object's size, texture, softness, gripper, and contact dynamics is rather difficult. Moreover, the object has …

A Scalable Approach For Reliable Downstream Data Delivery In Wireless Sensor Networks, Seung Jong Park, Ramanuja Vedantham, Raghupathy Sivakumar, Ian F. Akyildiz

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

There exist several applications of sensor networks where reliability of data delivery can be critical. While the redundancy inherent in a sensor network might increase the degree of reliability, it by no means can provide any guaranteed reliability semantics. In this paper, we consider the problem of reliable sink-to-sensors data delivery. We first identify several fundamental challenges that need to be addressed and are unique to a wireless sensor network environment. We then propose a scalable framework for reliable down-stream data delivery that is specifically designed to both address and leverage the characteristics of a wireless sensor network, while achieving …

A Discrete-Time Model For Triply Selective Mimo Rayleigh Fading Channels, Chengshan Xiao, Jingxian Wu, Sang-Yick Leong, Y. Rosa Zheng, Khaled Ben Letaief

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A statistical discrete-time model is proposed for simulating wideband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channels which are triply selective due to angle spread, Doppler spread, and delay spread. The new discrete-time MIMO channel model includes the combined effects of the transmit filter, physical MIMO multipath channel fading, and receive filter, and it has the same sampling period as that of the MIMO receiver. This leads to very efficient simulation of physical continuous-time MIMO channels. A new method is also presented to efficiently generate the MIMO channel stochastic coefficients. The statistical accuracy of the discrete-time MIMO channel model is rigorously verified through …

A Method For Enhancing The Snapshot Performance In San Volume Manager, Chang-Soo Kim, Dong-Jae Kang, Young-Ho Kim, Hag-Young Kim, Myoung-Jun Kim, Yu-Hyeon Bak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.