Digital Commons Network^™

Predictive Data Compression Using Adaptive Arithmetic Coding, Claudio Jose Iombo

LSU Master's Theses

The commonly used data compression techniques do not necessarily provide maximal compression and neither do they define the most efficient framework for transmission of data. In this thesis we investigate variants of the standard compression algorithms that use the strategy of partitioning of the data to be compressed. Doing so not only increases the compression ratio in many instances, it also reduces the maximum data block size for transmission. The partitioning of the data is made using a Markov model to predict if doing so would result in increased compression ratio. Experiments have been performed on text files comparing the …

Flow Field And Heat Transfer Analyses Of Mechanical Seals, Zhaogao Luan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mechanical seals are widely used in rotating equipment such as pumps, turbines and agitators to prevent leakage. One crucial factor for keeping seals reliable is the thermal behavior of the seal rings. The existing literature on thermal effects in seals primarily concentrates on the conduction of heat into the rings. Yet, a more complete analysis requires understanding of the flow field around the rings. In this dissertation, both the laminar and turbulent flows within the seal chamber are studied and their effects on the heat transfer in the seal rings are evaluated. Based on extensive sets of numerical simulations, heat …

The Art Of Perception: Robert Irwin's Central Garden At The J. Paul Getty Center, Jennifer Kay Zell

LSU Master's Theses

In this study of The Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Center was found evidence that the Central Garden designed by Robert Irwin is a postmodern garden. Beginning with an evaluation and description of the individual elements and conditions of the garden, the study then explores the larger body of artistic work produced by Irwin. This investigation also extrapolates how the ideas of modernism and postmodernism have been applied to past works of landscape architecture. The precedents provide a basis for interpretation and analysis of the Central Garden. Direct observation of visitors at the Central Garden provided evidence of …

Glacial Deposits, Vol. 35, 2006-2007, Department Of Geography-Geology

Glacial Deposits

Newsletter of the Department of Geography-Geology

Effects Of Aversive Conditioning On Behavior Of Nuisance Louisiana Black Bears, Jennifer Leigh

LSU Master's Theses

Consistent habitat loss and fragmentation are contributing factors to the rise of human-bear conflicts in south Louisiana. Complaints associated with nuisance activities of Louisiana black bears (Ursus americanus luteolus) experienced in this region have steadily increased since 2000, requiring intervention by state and federal agencies. As a threatened species, Louisiana black bears require non-lethal management referred to as aversive conditioning. We used rubber buckshot and dogs to test the effectiveness of management techniques used by the state to deter nuisance activity by black bears. Eleven bears, representing approximately 15% of the estimated population in this region, were captured in residential …

Identifying Effective And Ineffective Schools For Accountability Purposes: A Comparison Of Four Generic Types Of Accountability Models, Fen Yu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The stakes associated with student performance have been raised to new highs under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2001). Many people are concerned with the adequacy and appropriateness of the statistical models used in identifying low-performing schools for educational accountability. The purpose of this study was to compare four generic types of accountability models (i.e., status models, improvement models, growth models, and value-added models) and see if they reach consistent/inconsistent conclusions regarding the effectiveness of the same set of schools. Further, the four models were also compared in terms of “fairness”. A fair model is defined as one …

Stereochemical And Regiochemical Trends In The Selective Spectrophotometric Detection Of Biological Molecules, Shan Jiang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Useful mechanistic studies to date concerning sugar detection by arylboronic acid chemosensors have mainly involved the elucidation of equilibrium constants and the role of boron-nitrogen interactions in signal transduction. However, several discreet sugarboronate complexes exist in solution. This is due to the complex equilibria between isomeric species of even the simplest monosaccharides. Relatively few reports have been devoted to a systematic study of the structures of each of the corresponding individual sugar-boronate complexes. We have investigated some of the precise regio- and stereochemical features of the various equilibrating sugar isomers that induce selective signal transduction. As a result of this …

Synthesis Of Quaternary Dendronized Cellulose Derivatives And Their Potential Biological Applications, Changde Zhang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, novel dendronized cellulose derivatives with biodegradable backbones were created by using sodium carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) as the starting material. CMC was first transformed into its corresponding tetrabutyl ammonium salt, which reacted with 2-chloro-N-methylpyridinium iodide (CMPI) to produce an activated ester of [2-(N-methyl pyridium) carboxymethyl cellulose] iodide (MPCMCI). The reaction of MPCMCPI and di-tert-butyl 4-[2-(ter-butoxycarbonyl)ethyl]-4-aminoheptanedicarboxylate (BA) produced a new derivative with BA dendron elaborated on cellulose backbone (CMCBA). The degree of substitution (DS) of CMCBA was adjusted by controlling the relative concentration of CMPI and by choosing CMC with different DS or different molecular weights. Thermogrametric analysis (TGA) …

Measurement Of Metal Migration In Sediment Caps With X-Ray Fluorescene, Ming Yin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT Sand is often used as a passive barrier to slow release of metals from the sediment and to separate benthic organisms from the sediment. Materials that effectively adsorb metals have the potential to provide significantly greater effectiveness by further retarding metal release. In this thesis, the effectiveness of apatite and Phosphil®, which contain phosphate in a form that can absorb many metals, is evaluated with a series of sorption and migration column experiments using Cr, Cu, Zn and Pb. Langmuir shape isotherms were observed suggesting that the effectiveness of these materials decreases at high concentration. The sorption isotherm experiments …

Synthesis And Evaluation Of Derivatives And Analogs Of Xanthene Dyes, Xiangyang Xu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Xanthene dyes are one of the oldest synthetic dyes. Fluorescein was first synthesized by von Baeyer in 1871. Since its discovery, it has been extensively studied. Fluorescein can exist as four different ionic forms (cationic form, neutral form, monoanionic form and dianionic form). Under physiological conditions (pH 7.4), fluorescein mainly exists as the dianionic form which grants it large quantum yield and excellent solubility in water. This renders fluorescein and its derivatives useful for studies in biological media. Cysteine (Cys) and homocysteine (Hcy) are of the few amino acids which contain sulfur and both of them are believed to be …

Book Review. All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes By Daniel W. Drezner, David Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Rna:Dna As An Indicator Of Nutritional Condition And Growth In Larval Naked Goby, Gobiosoma Bosc, Michelle C. Satterwhite

LSU Master's Theses

Developing organism-based metrics for assessing habitat quality is an important tool in conservation and restoration of aquatic habitats. The use of the RNA:DNA ratio as an early indicator of habitat effects on growth of nekton species has been suggested, but requires species-specific laboratory assessment prior to field application. We used food availability in laboratory treatments to simulate differences in habitat quality. Wild Gobiosoma bosc eggs were collected using nest-traps constructed of PVC pipe. Eggs from several different nests collected in the field were hatched in the lab, yielding larvae that were randomly assigned to three feeding treatments in two replicate …

Experimental Investigation Of An Electronically Collimated Radiation Detector For Location Of Gamma-Ray Sources, William H. Hill Jr.

LSU Master's Theses

A electronically collimated prototype detector was built with commercially available cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) modules and assessed by experiment and simulation. Sensitivity was roughly equivalent to a common hand held 1"x1" NaI(Tl) detector. The maximum useful count rate was 300 counts per second (cps) per module. Overall angular error was less than 7°, which is generally less than source placement uncertainty, and angular resolution was between 20° and 40° for several common isotopes with photon energies between 511 keV and 1333 keV. Prototype data and backprojections were used to verify a simple three dimensional model of charge induction in pixellated …

The Education Of Princess Mary Tudor, Katherine Lee Pierret Perkins

LSU Master's Theses

Mary Tudor, the first officially crowned queen regnant of England, received a humanist education. A curriculum was recommended for her in multiple writings by Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives. This thesis attempts to synthesize and examine information the nature of this plan for a princess's education and the extent to which it was implemented.

Exploring The Quark-Gluon Content Of Hadrons: From Mesons To Nuclear Matters, Hrayr Hamlet Matevosyan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Even though Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) was formulated over three decades ago, it poses enormous challenges for describing the properties of hadrons from the underlying quark-gluon degrees of freedom. Moreover, the problem of describing the nuclear force from its quark-gluon origin is still open. While a direct solution of QCD to describe the hadrons and nuclear force is not possible at this time, we explore a variety of developed approaches ranging from phenomenology to first principle calculations at one or other level of approximation in linking the nuclear force to QCD. The Dyson Schwinger formulation (DSE) of coupled integral equations for …

Denitrification Capacity And Denitrifying Bacteria In A Restored Bottomland Hardwood Forest, Mississippi River Alluvial Valley: Hydrological Impacts, Yan Li

LSU Master's Theses

Mississippi River Alluvial Valley (MAV) is one of the most important ecosystems in the United States, and bottomland hardwood forests (BLHs) are a major components of this ecosystem. The ecological and hydrological functions of BLHs can help maintain the diversity of species, groundwater balance, and nutrient removal etc. However, due to the increased human activities in the area, most of the BLHs were converted to agricultural land. Realizing the seriousness of the situation of the ecosystem, a series of programs have been carried out by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to …

Probing The Association Behavior Of Hydrophobic Organic Compounds With Dissolved Humic Materials, Hadi M. Marwani

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The association mechanism between hydrophobic organic compounds (HOC) and dissolved humic materials (DHM) has continued to be one of the interesting areas in environmental applications. The goal of the research reported in this dissertation is to investigate the association behavior of HOC with DHM. The first part of this research involves steady-state fluorescence measurements of these multi-component systems to study the effect of DHM content on the association mechanism of HOC, in particular using pyrene as a model. Results showed that steady-state fluorescence alone may not provide enough information about the quenching mechanism of pyrene with DHM. Lifetime based fluorescence …

Investigation Of Superficial Dose From A Static Tomotherapy Beam, Koren Suzette Smith

LSU Master's Theses

Abstract Purpose: The TomoTherapy planning system is capable of creating treatment plans that deliver a homogeneous dose to superficial targets. It is essential that the planning system accurately predicts dose to the surface and superficial depths from beams directed at every angle in the axial plane. This work concentrates on measuring and modeling the dose from a static TomoTherapy beam at normal and oblique incidence. It was hypothesized that superficial doses measured from a static TomoTherapy beam agree with doses calculated by the TomoTherapy planning system to within 5% of the maximum dose for angles of incidence from 0¢ª-83¢ª. Methods: …

Visualizing The Menstrual Cycle: Effects Of A Redesigned Cycle Diagram On Community College Biology Students' Learning, Francesca Maria Mellieon-Williams

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This mixed methods, exploratory study investigated the importance of the menstrual cycle diagram for understanding human reproduction. Several theories were used to support this study including Visual Design Theory (Tufte, 1990, 1997, 2001), and Human Constructivist Theory (Mintzes, Wandersee, Novak 1998). The two sexuality education programs used by society, abstinence-only programs and comprehensive sex education programs were compared to illustrate how this study applies to the current state of sexuality education in the United States. Community college students from two institutions in the southern region of the United States, registered in five introductory biological science courses, participated in a unit …

Understanding The New York Rabies Epizootic 1985-2005, David Dorrell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Surveillance data are an important part of medical geography. These data are used to produce much of the analyses that define the subdiscipline. It is understood that surveillance data may contain biases, but there have only been limited studies devoted to determining in what ways the data are not representative of actual disease prevalence. New York was selected for this research for several reasons. First, it has a strong rabies data set. Second, it has a centralized system of licensing animal and dog control officers. Third, it is well-represented in terms of local media. This dissertation attempts to better understand …

Granular Contact Lubrication: Theory And Experiment, Karim El Kholy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is devoted to a theoretical and experimental study of the granular contact lubrication, both. The theory is based on the kinetic of the granular material where the granules interact with each other and with the boundary surfaces through instantaneous, binary collisions, characterized by a constant coefficient of restitution. Specifically this study focuses on granular lubrication in Couette flows. A series of simulations is reported and the results show good agreement with several published papers. Also, a theory that ties the true temperature to the grain mobility is developed. The true temperature of a granular material depends on the …

Synthesis And Functionalizations Of Tetrapyrrole Derivatives, Lijuan Jiao

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Chapter 1 of this Dissertation presents a brief overview of the history of tetrapyrrole derivatives and of their fundamental properties. Overviews of porphyrins, benzoporphyrins, chlorins and porphycenes are presented. Work presented in Chapter 2 through Chapter 4 mainly focuses on the syntheses and functionalization of chromophore-extended porphyrin derivatives. Several new synthetic routes for the syntheses and functionalizations of extended porphyrins either at the β-position or at the meso-position of porphyrin are developed. From these improved synthetic routes, the regio-selective syntheses of porphyrin derivatives are described. Chapter 2 mainly focuses on the syntheses of β,β'-fused methylenepropanoporphyrins and related porphyrin dimers. Chapter …

Dr. Frankenstein Was A Designer: Methods For Educating Gen H--The Hybrid Design Student, Patricia Ferguson Vining

LSU Master's Theses

Business Week recently launched an innovation and design quarterly entitled In, as well as a Website section specifically dedicated to design and innovation. Fast Company, with its Third Annual Masters of Design issue, and Fortune have also added significant design content to their publications. The business world appears to have discovered design as a vital strategic tool and economic force. Globalization and the Internet knowledge explosion have changed our world in unprecedented ways. Design thinking, which was previously relegated to dealing with issues such as form and function, has become the twenty-first century methodology for the development of new business …

The Spectral And Photophysical Characterization Of Water Solubilizing Metal Phthalocyanines For Highly Sensitive Detection In Biological Studies, Vera Tamisha Verdree

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Efforts to improve the technology for DNA analyses stimulated the work presented here to develop a series of fluorescent probes that would aid in the increased multiplexing capabilities allowing the ability to detect multiple targets in a single measurement. Typically, spectral discrimination has been used to identify each DNA fragment in sequencing or diagnostic applications by means of unique emission properties from several labeling dyes. This has been accomplished with labels that fluoresce in the visible region. The limitations with these dyes is the broad emission profile making discrimination difficult, high intrinsic biological fluorescence and structural differences of the dyes …

A Directional Algorithm For An Electronically-Collimated Radiation Detector (Ecrd), Adam Lackie

LSU Master's Theses

An electronically-collimated radiation detector (ECRD) is being developed to be used for locating radiation sources, e.g. for intraoperative localization of sentinel lymph nodes, or for public safety applications. The design emphasizes a compact, portable detector with a wide field of view. Typical probes provide either high sensitivity but no directional information when uncollimated, or directional information but poor detection efficiency when collimated. The ECRD design provides high sensitivity to the presence of radiation because it lacks physical collimation, and simultaneously provides directional information using electronic collimation. Intended to be a hand-held device, the ECRD front end comprises an array of …

Hope For Today And Tomorrow: Identity Construction Power, And Persistence Of Community College Women Who Are First In Their Families To Attend College, Crystal Deer Lee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation was a case study of four community college women who were first in their families to attend college. Through this study, the “first-generation” construct was analyzed in regard to its uses and limits. The researcher found the label as an identifier becomes problematic through social discourse. These results confirm London’s (1996) finding that students themselves do not necessarily find anything unique about their situations or anything in common with other students simply based on their being the first in their families to attend college. Therefore, the “first-generation” construct may be viewed primarily as a higher education versus an …

Exploring The Binding Of Amine And Sulfonamide Ligands In Rhenium(I) Tricarbonyl And Platinum(Ii) Complexes, Anna Maria Christoforou

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Platinum is the metal present in various classes of inorganic medicinal agents directed at important diseases such as cancer or viral infections. Several new Pt(II) complexes of polyamine ligands bearing a dansyl moiety linked by a sulfonamide group were prepared; in some cases the sulfonamide nitrogen formed a bond to Pt. The sulfonamido group donates strongly to Pt and places the dansyl group close to a vacant coordination position, allowing it to stack with bound guanine base (G) when G binds. The emission of the fluorophore decreases with decreasing distance to Pt. Metal nuclide radiopharmaceuticals contain a metal core and …

An Empirical Analysis Of Life Tenure: A Response To Professors Calabresi And Lindgren, Ryan W. Scott, David R. Stras

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Opposition to life tenure has been steadily mounting in the legal academy and Professors Steve Calabresi and Jim Lindgren are among those leading the charge. Crucial to their argument that life tenure is fundamentally flawed is an empirical claim that the increases in average tenure among Supreme Court Justices are both dramatic and unprecedented.

In this article, the authors respond to Calabresi and Lindgren by showing that their hypothesis of dramatic and unprecedented growth in average tenure has two fundamental flaws. First, it suffers from a period-selection problem. Rendering the data using longer or shorter periods blunts or eliminates the …

Investigation Of Utility Of Delta-T Theta Probe For Obtaining Surficial Moisture Measurements On Beaches, Phillip P. Schmutz

LSU Master's Theses

Recent studies have reported on the use of a new device to measure beach 'surface' moisture content, the Delta-T Theta Probe. However, the sensor length (6.0 cm) is too long for measurement of true surface moisture conditions. This study investigated the reliability of the Theta Probe as sensor length is reduced to lengths of 1.5, 1.0, and 0.5 cm. Field investigations were conducted at sites in Texas and North Carolina, in order to evaluate the influence of differing sediment sizes on probe output. It was found that calibration R^2 values remained high and only a minimal increase in standard error …

Optimum Energy Allocation For Detection In Wireless Sensor Networks, Krishna Kishore Gunturu

LSU Master's Theses

The problem of binary hypothesis testing in a wireless sensor network is studied in the presence of noisy channels and for non-identical sensors. We have designed a mathematically tractable fusion rule for which optimal energy allocation for individual sensors can be achieved. In this thesis we considered two methods for transmitting the sensor observations; binary modulation and M-ary modulation. In binary modulation we are able to allocate the energy among the sensors and protect the individual quantized bits where as the M-ary modulation provides optimum energy allocation only among the sensors. The goal is to design a fusion rule and …