Digital Commons Network^™

Heller And Constitutional Interpretation: Originalism's Last Gasp, Rory K. Little

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Electronic Lawyer, Richard L. Marcus

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Second Amendment Decision Rules, Calvin R. Massey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Using Salience And Influence To Narrow The Tax Gap, Susan C. Morse

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Eigenanalysis And Synthesis Of Unitary Operators Used In Quantum Computing Algorithms, Steven Randall Hutsell

Dissertations and Theses

In this work we tackle the challenge of designing quantum unitary operators which represent solutions to optimization problems. We start with a novel method which combines an evolutionary algorithm known as an Evolution Strategy (ES) with a method to randomly generate unitary operators. With this new method, a quantum operator is represented for the first time using real-valued vectors and can be "evolved" or designed to meet certain target criteria. This criteria could be the solution to an optimization problem. With the ability to evolve quantum operators, we attempt to evolve various known single and multi-qubit quantum gates as well …

Factors Associated With Inclusion Of Spirituality In Secular Social Work Education, Leslie Grace Wuest

Dissertations and Theses

In a diverse society, social work practitioners must be able to work with and respect people from a wide variety of cultures and ethnicities and with different value systems and ideological perspectives, including spiritual or religious beliefs. Accordingly, social work education has begun to incorporate the topic of spirituality. This study builds upon previous studies by Dudley and Helfgott (1990) and Sheridan et al. (1994) which focused on views of faculty members regarding spirituality in social work education and support for a course on spirituality in the social work curriculum. This study goes on to examine inclusion of spirituality in …

Dynamic Task Prediction For An Spmt Architecture Based On Control Independence, Komal Jothi

Dissertations and Theses

Exploiting better performance from computer programs translates to finding more instructions to execute in parallel. Since most general purpose programs are written in an imperatively sequential manner, closely lying instructions are always data dependent, making the designer look far ahead into the program for parallelism. This necessitates wider superscalar processors with larger instruction windows. But superscalars suffer from three key limitations, their inability to scale, sequential fetch bottleneck and high branch misprediction penalty. Recent studies indicate that current superscalars have reached the end of the road and designers will have to look for newer ideas to build computer processors.

Speculative …

Cognition And Star Trek: Learning And Legal Education, Kate Bloch

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Saving Private Ryan's Tax Refund, Francine J. Lipman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Infant Communicative Behaviors And Maternal Responsiveness, Chinwe Laura Onwujuba

LSU Master's Theses

This study is an examination of infant communication and maternal responsivity in order to determine the impact of training on mother-infant communicative interaction. A sample of three mothers and their infants were observed during 10 minute free play sessions before and after a training intervention. The focus of the training was the principles of parenting contained in the Right-from-Birth: A Parenting Series (Grace & Lindsey, 2003) training. A multiple baseline design was used to measure maternal responsiveness to infant communication. Positive and negative maternal responses, as well as the rate of infant communication were also measured. Results showed an increase …

Teaching Level-1 Braille Reading Skills Within A Stimulus Equivalence Paradigm To Children With Progressive Visual Impairments, Karen Ann Toussaint

LSU Master's Theses

Degenerative visual impairments refer to conditions that result in the progressive loss of vision; several of these conditions have their onset during childhood. Nearly 3% of the school-aged population will experience vision loss that will require specialized support, yet there has been little attempt to systematically evaluate braille-instruction programs. The current study evaluated an instructive procedure for teaching early braille-reading skills with four school-aged children with degenerative visual impairments. Following a series of pretests, braille instruction involved providing a sample braille letter and teaching the selection of the corresponding printed text letter from a comparison array. Concomitant with increases in …

Analysis Of Progessive Lag Reinforcement Schedules And Environmental Cues On Verbal Response Variability, Brian Esteve

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined the effectiveness of progressive lag reinforcement schedules to increase novel and appropriate verbal responses to academic skills for three children with language delays. The effect of visual cues on verbal responses was evaluated in conjunction with progressive lag reinforcement schedules using a multiple baseline with an embedded alternating treatments design. Basic research utilizing lag reinforcement schedules have shown to increase variable behavior in both animal and human participants; however, little research has been conducted to evaluate lag reinforcement schedules in applied settings. The results of this study preliminarily indicate that progressive lag reinforcement schedules are an effective …

Ternary To Binary Converter Design In Cmos Using Multiple Input Floating Gate Mosfets, Josephine Ratna Sathiaraj

LSU Master's Theses

In this work, a ternary to binary converter circuit is designed in 0.5μm n-well CMOS technology. The circuit takes two inputs corresponding to the ternary bits and gives four outputs, which are the binary equivalent bits of the ternary inputs. The ternary inputs range from (-1,-1)³ to (1,1) ³ which are decimal -4 to 4 and the four binary output bits are the sign bit (SB), most significant bit (MSB), second significant bit (SSB) and the least significant bit (LSB). The ternary inputs (-1, 0 and 1) are represented in terms of voltages of -3V, 0V and 3V. Multiple …

Effects Of Acephate On The Distribution Of Tarnished Plant Bugs Within The Cotton Plant Profile, Kyle Andrew Fontenot

LSU Master's Theses

The tarnished plant bug, Lygus lineolaris (Palisot de Beauvois), is a primary pest of cotton in the mid-southern United States. Chemical control strategies are the primary integrated pest management tool used to manage this pest in cotton. A better understanding of tarnished plant bug behavior and distribution on cotton plants is needed to improve the scouting and monitoring protocols used to estimate population and crop injury levels needed to initiate treatments. This pest frequently re-infests fields after insecticide treatments. Sampling protocols should consider the sub-lethal effects of insecticides on migrating populations or on survivors that remain on insecticide-treated plants. Studies …

Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute Newsletter, Portland State University. Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute

Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute Newsletters

Newsletter provides information on:

• Updates on the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute
• Recent presentations
• Research roundup
• Articles highlight criminology and criminal justice today

Experimental And Numerical Modeling Of Stresses In Non-Conventional Cross-Sectioned Composite Pipes, Prashanth Ramachandran

LSU Master's Theses

Composite materials have been widely used in the ship-building, aerospace and construction industries because of their distinct advantages of low weight, high stiffness, and high strength to weight ratios. These properties are due to the low weight of the epoxy core matrix and high strengths of the glass/carbon fibers. Composite pipes used in various applications are traditionally spherical in cross-section. In this study, non-conventional cross-sectioned composite pipes [i.e. rectangular and triangular cross-sections] have been proposed, fabricated, tested and analyzed because of their ability to be bundled without loss of space. The behaviors of these pipes under an internal pressure test …

Modeling Gag Grouper (Mycteroperca Microlepis) In The Gulf Of Mexico: Exploring The Impact Of Marine Reserves On The Population Dynamics Of A Protogynous Grouper, Robert D. Ellis

LSU Master's Theses

The gag grouper (Mycteroperca microlepis) population in the Gulf of Mexico supports both a commercial and recreational fishery but has experienced a decrease in the male to female sex ratio over the past thirty years. Protogynous fish populations naturally have a smaller male to female ratio than gonochoristic fish populations; however the decline in the gag population is such that sperm limitation may be occurring. In an effort to correct the decline in sex ratio, fishery managers have recently implemented two marine reserves designed specifically to protect gag spawning aggregations. Results from two population models (an age-structured model and an …

Teaching Freedom: Exclusionary Rights Of Student Groups, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

Progressive, anti-subordination values support robust First Amendment protection for high school and university students, including strong rights of expressive association, even when those rights clash with educational institutions' nondiscrimination policies. The leading cases addressing the conflicts between nondiscrimination policies and exclusionary student groups are polarized and distorted by their culture war context. That context tainted the leading authority, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, and is especially salient in the student expressive association cases, many of which are being aggressively litigated by religious groups with strong anti-homosexuality goals. The strength of these First Amendment claims can be difficult to recognize …

A Garden-Based Nutrition Education Summer Program Positively Impacts The Fruit And Vegetable Preferences Of Inner-City High School Students, Emily K. Neustrom

LSU Master's Theses

Americans, especially low-income citizens, do not meet the daily USDA recommendations for fruit and vegetable consumption. Low fruit and vegetable intake can be associated with several types of chronic diseases. The dietary patterns established at a young age often carry into adulthood, hence the need for nutrition education beginning in youth. Studies have shown that nutrition education coupled with a gardening program can impact youth's nutrition choices and snack preferences. The Summer Experience was an eight-week garden-based nutrition education program designed to teach gardening, cooking, nutrition, business and life skills for inner-city high school students in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The …

Dynamics Of Vortical Structures In A Low-Blowing-Ratio Pulsed Transverse Jet, Clementine Vezier

LSU Master's Theses

Large Eddy Simulation is used to study the interaction of a 35° inclined jet into a crossflow. Steady state cases, with a BR ranging from 0.150 to 1.2, are firstly examined to understand the dynamics of the flow field. Iso-surface of Laplacian of the pressure, vorticity contour and velocity fields highlight the presence of four main vortical structures: shear layer vortices, horse-shoes vortices, wake vortices and CRVP. Qualitative comparisons are performed between simulations and experiments. The dynamics of the flow field is next characterized by pulsing the jet. The studied pulsed cases have same low BR and duty cycle respectively …

Vitreo-Retinal Traction And Anastrozole Use, Alvin Eisner, Emily J. Thielman, Julie Falardeau, John T. Vetto

Community Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose—This study tested a prediction stemming from the hypothesis that anastrozole users experience heightened vitreo-retinal traction. This hypothesis was based on the knowledge that menopause increases the risk of intraocular tractional events such as posterior vitreous detachments (PVDs).

Methods—Retinal thickness was measured for 3 groups of amenorrheic women: (1) anastrozole users and (2) tamoxifen users undergoing adjuvant therapy for early-stage breast cancer, and (3) control subjects not using hormonal medication. Foveal shape indices were derived for subjects without PVDs.

Results—For anastrozole users, the distance to the temporal side of the fovea became less than the distance to …

Evaluating Similarity-Based Trace Reduction Techniques For Scalable Performance Analysis, Kathryn Marie Mohror, Karen L. Karavanic

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Event traces are required to correctly diagnose a number of performance problems that arise on today’s highly parallel systems. Unfortunately, the collection of event traces can produce a large volume of data that is difficult, or even impossible, to store and analyze. One approach for compressing a trace is to identify repeating trace patterns and retain only one representative of each pattern. However, determining the similarity of sections of traces, i.e., identifying patterns, is not straightforward. In this paper, we investigate pattern-based methods for reducing traces that will be used for performance analysis. We evaluate the different methods against several …

Heuristics In Decision Making, Fatima M. Albar, Antonie J. Jetter

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Heuristics are simple rules of thumbs for problem solving that follow a logic that is quite different from consequential logic. They have long been regarded, as an inferior technique for decision making that is the source of irrational decision behavior. Recently, decision making researchers have demonstrated that some heuristics are highly efficient and can compete with complex decision models in some application domains. This paper explores the different streams of research, summarizes the state of the art decision making model, and discusses its implications for complex decisions in engineering and technology management.

Reconfigurable End Effector Allowing For In-Hand Manipulation Without Finger Gaiting Or Regrasping, Jacob Ames Ziesmer

Master's Theses (2009 -)

The goal of this thesis is to move a step towards the solution of the bin picking problem. A novel metamorphic end effector is proposed, tested for proof of concept and analyzed using standard techniques of degrees of freedom and graph theory as well as a classical dynamic analysis. Once proof of concept was achieved, the results from the analysis were formed into an optimization program with the hope of finding a more stable, predictable mechanism.

Rfid Tags / Planar Inductors As Chemical Sensor Platforms In Liquid Sensing Applications, Gregory Donald Schumacher-Novak

Master's Theses (2009 -)

In this work, RFID tags are investigated as a liquid-phase chemical sensing platform. A dual-layer of selective coating film with polyaniline (PANi) on top of poly(epichlorohydrin) (PECH) is used for the detection of trace amounts of organic compounds (toluene and ethylbenzene) in aqueous solutions. Various experiments were performed to evaluate the coated RFID tag sensors. Shifts in the impedance and resonant frequency due to analyte sorption are measured. Details of the responses of the dual-layer film to different pH baseline solutions are shown. The results show that this dual-layer film can be used to detect toluene and ethylbenzene with high …

Eeg During Pedaling: Brain Activity During A Locomotion-Like Task In Humans, Sanket G. Jain

Master's Theses (2009 -)

This study characterized the brain electrical activity during pedaling, a locomotor-like task, in humans. We postulated that phasic brain activity would be associated with active pedaling, consistent with a cortical role in locomotor tasks. 64 channels of electroencephalogram (EEG) and 10 channels of electromyogram (EMG) data were recorded from 10 neurologically-intact volunteers while they performed active and passive (no effort) pedaling on a custom-designed stationary bicycle. Ensemble average waveforms, two dimensional topographic maps and amplitude of the beta (13-35 Hz) frequency band were analyzed and compared between active and passive trials. The absolute amplitude (peak positive-peak negative) of the EEG …

Numerical Modeling Of Hemodynamics In The Thoracic Aorta And Alterations By Dacron Patch Treatment Of Aortic Coarctation, Ronak Jashwant Dholakia

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Coarctation of the aorta (CoA) is a major congenital heart disease, characterized by a severe stenosis of the proximal descending thoracic aorta. Traditionally, surgery has been the treatment of choice for CoA. Dacron patch aortoplasty gained increased popularity after its introduction in the mid-twentieth century due to its advantages over other surgical treatment methods available at the time. A major complication with Dacron patch aortoplasty has been the formation of late aneurysm with as much as 51% incidence reported in follow up studies. The change in aortic morphology and formation of aneurysms after Dacron patch surgery could lead to local …

Methodology Appendix: On The Craft Of Sociology In The Digital Era, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

An appendix to the book that explores the methodology of studying the Internet.

Weaving Color Lines: Race, Ethnicity, And The Work Of Leadership In Social Change Organizations, Sonia Ospina, Celina Su

Publications and Research

For social change organizations working to address intractable social problems throughout the USA, tackling race may not only be unavoidable; it may represent a way to fully engage stakeholders in social change work. We argue that illuminating the relationship between race and leadership can advance our under- standing of how social change leadership happens in practice. We build upon scholarship that emphasizes the ways in which seemingly essentialist, intractable racial categories are actually mutable, and the simultaneous emergence of academic research calling attention to the constructed and collective dimensions of leadership. Using a constructionist lens to analyze narratives from 22 …

Experience And Consciousness: Enhancing The Notion Of Musical Understanding, Adriana Renero

Publications and Research

Abstract:

Disagreeing with Jerrold Levinson’s claim that being conscious of broad span musical form is not essential to understanding music, I will argue that our awareness of musical architecture is significant to achieve comprehension. I will show that the experiential model is not incompatible with the analytic model. My main goal is to show that these two models can be reconciled through the identification of a broader notion of understanding. After accomplishing this reconciliation by means of my new conception, I will close the paper by discussing some reasons to accept an enhancing notion of musical understanding that includes levels …