Digital Commons Network^™

Statistical Broadcast Protocol Design For Vanet, Michael J. Slavik

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

This work presents the development of the Statistical Location-Assisted Broadcast (SLAB) protocol, a multi-hop wireless broadcast protocol designed for vehicular ad-hoc networking (VANET). Vehicular networking is an important emerging application of wireless communications. Data dissemination applications using VANET promote the ability for vehicles to share information with each other and the wide-area network with the goal of improving navigation, fuel consumption, public safety, and entertainment. A critical component of these data dissemination schemes is the multi-hop wireless broadcast protocol. Multi-hop broadcast protocols for these schemes must reliably deliver broadcast packets to vehicles in a geographically bounded region while consuming as …

Statistical Correlation Between Economic Activity And Dmsp-Ols Night Light Images In Florida, Dolores J. Forbes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Optical Line Scan (OLS) instruments collect data from an altitude of approximately 830km above the surface of the Earth. The night light data from these instruments has been shown to correlate by lit area with national level Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and to correlate with GDP at the State level by total radiance value. Very strong correlation is found between the night light data at a new, larger scale, the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) within the state of Florida. Additional statistical analysis was performed to determine which industries within each MSA explain the greatest …

Stability Analysis Of Feature Selection Approaches With Low Quality Data, Wilker. Altidor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

One of the greatest challenges to data mining is erroneous or noisy data. Several studies have noted the weak performance of classification models trained from low quality data. This dissertation shows that low quality data can also impact the effectiveness of feature selection, and considers the effect of class noise on various feature ranking techniques. It presents a novel approach to feature ranking based on ensemble learning and assesses these ensemble feature selection techniques in terms of their robustness to class noise. It presents a noise-based stability analysis that measures the degree of agreement between a feature ranking techniques output …

Strength And Toughness Of Hdpe Fiber Reinforced Aggregate Concrete As A Sustainable Construction Material, Roody. Numa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

An experimental study was conducted on the strength and toughness characteristics of concrete made from recycled aggregate, cement and fly ash reinforced with reclaimed high density polyethylene plastic (HDPE) fibers. The objectives of the investigation were: (1) to evaluate the performance of a sustainable concrete containing up to 90% recycled materials; (2) to determine the variation of strength and toughness with a Fiber Factor incorporating length, width and amount of HDPE fibers; (3) to identify the best performing mix design based on tensile strength and toughness and (4) to provide some guidelines for the use of this sustainable composite in …

Source Speed Estimation Using A Pilot Tone In A High-Frequency Acoustic Modem, Poorani. Kathiroli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

This thesis proposes to estimate the speed of a moving acoustic source by either linear or non linear processing of the resulting Doppler shift present in a high-frequency pilot tone. The source is an acoustic modem (Hermes) which currently uses moving average to estimate and compensate for Doppler shift. A new auto regressive approach to Doppler estimation (labeled IIR method in the text) promises to give a better estimate. The results for a simulated peak velocity of 2 m/s in the presence of additive noise showed an RMSE of 0.23 m/s using moving average vs. 0.00018 m/s for the auto …

Surface Pressure Fluctuations Due To An Impinging Underexpanded Supersonic Jet, Binu. Pundir

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

The impingement of supersonic jets on surfaces is of interest because of its important application to jet blast deflectors (JBD), and short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft (STOVL) during hover. Typically, on an aircraft carrier deck, the impingement of the jet blast on the deflector generates impingement tones, and structural vibrations, not only on the JBD but also on the ship deck. Therefore, apart from direct transmission of jet noise to the gallery level, there is a component of noise transmitted due to the impingement of the jet on the JBD. The objectives of this work are to study the …

Studied Girlhoods, Regina. Dilgen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

Dorothy Allison's Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Barbara Robinette Moss's Change Me into Zeus's Daughter are memoirs published in the 1990s of girlhoods in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This dissertation uses and expands upon the approaches of the multi-disciplinary Girls' Studies in analyzing how these memoirists theorize their own girlhoods. Each memoirist represents her experience in a culture that attempts to marginalize, silence, and define her. An application of the foundational work on girlhood in developmental psychology provides for an analysis of each memoirist's depiction of girlhood as a …

Study Of Cell Penetrating Peptides With Raman Spectroscopy And Microscopy, Jing. Ye

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

Cell penetrating peptides (CPPs) have drawn the attention of researchers due to their ability to internalize large cargos into cells including cancer cells. The mechanism(s) with which the peptides enter the cell, however, is/are not clear and full of controversy. The peptide conformations and their microenvironment in live cells had been unknown until the development of a technique developed in our lab. As a first demonstration of principle, penetratin, a 16-residue CPP derived from the Antennapedia homeodomain protein of Drosophila, was measured in single, living melanoma cells. Carbon-13 labeling of the Phe residue of penetratin was used to shift the …

System Identification Methodology For A Wave Adaptive Modular Unmanned Surface Vehicle, Janine L. Mask

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

The design, implementation, and testing of an experimental setup intended to evaluate the dynamic maneuvering performance of the Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel (WAM-V) class USV12, a 3.7 meter unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is described. A comprehensive sensor package was designed, fabricated and assembled to record the vehicle's dynamic response to various control inputs. All subsystems were fabricated and installed on a test vehicle, GUSS, and full system, open-loop maneuvering tests were conducted to show validity of data collection technique. Simulations were performed using model parameters found in the literature to create a "simulated experimental" data set, upon which system identification …

Systematic Evaluation Of Object Detection And Recognition Approaches With Context Capabilities, Urbina Rafael J Giusti

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

Contemporary computer vision solutions to the problem of object detection aim at incorporating contextual information into the process. This thesis proposes a systematic evaluation of the usefulness of incorporating knowledge about the geometric context of a scene into a baseline object detection algorithm based on local features. This research extends publicly available MATLABRª implementations of leading algorithms in the field and integrates them in a coherent and extensible way. Experiments are presented to compare the performance and accuracy between baseline and context-based detectors, using images from the recently published SUN09 dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that adding contextual information about the …

Transcending Political Party Constraints, Cara. Poplak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

This thesis analyzes how the American political system presents specific rhetorical constraints for independent and third party candidates who are "othered" by the system. To better understand how independent candidates overcome these constraints, the rhetoric of two such recent candidates, Charlie Crist and Joe Lieberman, is analyzed using ideographic criticism. These two candidates were originally affiliated with one of the two major political parties, but changed their party affiliation to run as Independent candidates. To facilitate their transition to independent candidates, both politicians used popular American political ideographs such as "the people," "freedom," and "unity" to maintain their allegiance to …

Turkey At The Crossroads, Ivana. Griacova

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

This study examines the shift of Turkish foreign policy from an alliance with the West to a close relationship with Muslim leaders in the 21st century. It attempts to understand the reasons why Turkish foreign policy has shifted from Atatèurk's principles of noninterference and neutrality to the ambition of making Turkey a global actor. In this respect it probes and assesses the determinants of Turkish foreign policy in the last decade under the rule of Prime Minister Erdogan, Foreign Minister Davutoglu and the governing political party, the Justice and Development Party. In arguing that Turkish foreign policy has in the …

Very High Frequency Mimo Underwater Acoustic Communications In Ports And Shallow Waters, Gaultier. Real

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

This thesis presents the development of a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) capable high bit rate acoustic modem operating at high frequencies. A MIMO channel estimation technique based on Least-Squares (LS) estimation is developed here. Channel deconvolution is completed using a Minimum Mean-Square Error (MMSE) Linear Equalizer (LE). An Interference Cancellation Linear Equalizer (ICLE) is used to provide the theoretical limit of the MIMO deconvolution process. The RMSE of the channel estimation process was 1.83 % and 6.1810 %, respectively for simulated and experimental data. Using experimental data, the RMSE before MIMO deconvolution process was 141.3 % and dropped down to 60.224 …

Web-Based Automated Classification System For Nursing Language Based On Nursing Theory, Subhomoy D. Dass

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

Health care systems consist of various individuals and organizations that aim to meet the health care needs of people and provide a complete and responsive health care solution. One of the important aspects of a health care delivery system is nursing. The use of technology is a vital aspect for delivering an optimum and complete nursing care to individuals; and also for improving the quality and delivery mechanism of nursing care. The model proposed in this thesis for Nursing Knowledge Management System is a novel knowledge-based decision support system for nurses to capture and manage nursing practice, and further, to …

Web-Based Wireless Sensor Network Monitoring Using Smartphones, Anthony M. Marcus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

This thesis consists of the development of a web based wireless sensor network (WSN) monitoring system using smartphones. Typical WSNs consist of networks of wireless sensor nodes dispersed over predetermined areas to acquire, process, and transmit data from these locations. Often it is the case that the WSNs are located in areas too hazardous or inaccessible to humans. We focused on the need for access to this sensed data remotely and present our reference architecture to solve this problem. We developed this architecture for web-based wireless sensor network monitoring and have implemented a prototype that uses Crossbow Mica sensors and …

What's So Fair About The Status Quo?, Nicholas J. Martens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

System justification theorists have proposed that people are motivated to view their political, economic, and social circumstances as desirable, necessary, and fair (e.g., Jost, Nosek & Banaji, 2004). Despite more than 15 years of system justification research, the meaning of fairness within this context has not been investigated directly. Over the past several decades three major criteria have been identified as contributing to people's perceptions of fairness: distributive justice, procedural justice, and one's own idiosyncratic set of personal values. Focusing on the last two, we reasoned that values are represented more abstractly than is information about procedural fairness, and that …

Young Children's Artifact Conceptualization, Patricia P. Schultz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

One of the most fundamental functions of human cognition is to parse an otherwise chaotic world into different kinds of things. The ability to learn what objects are and how to respond to them appropriately is essential for daily living. The literature has presented contrasting evidence about the role of perpetual features such as artifact appearance versus causal or inductive reasoning in chldren's category distinctions (e.g., function). The present project used a child-initiated inquiry paradigm to investigate how children conceptualize artifacts, specifically how they prioritize different types of information that typify not only novel but also familiar objects. Results underscore …

Administrative Change, Randy J. Kozel, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

Determining the standard of review for administrative actions has commanded judicial and scholarly interest like few other topics. Notwithstanding the extensive debates, far less consideration has been given to the unique features of agencies’ deviations from their own precedents. In this article we examine this puzzle of administrative change. By change, we mean a reversal of the agency’s former views about the best way to implement and interpret its regulatory mandate. We trace the lineage of administrative change at the Supreme Court and analyze features that distinguish agency reversals from other administrative actions. In particular, we contend that because administrative …

Development Of An Ultra-Lightweight Buckling-Restrained Brace Using Analytical And Numerical Methods, John Andrew Tinker

Dissertations and Theses

An ultra-lightweight buckling-restrained brace (ULWBRB) is developed using a highly ductile aluminum core and FRP restrainer. Utilization of lightweight materials results in a BRB that is 25% the weight of traditional mortar-filled tube varieties allowing easy installation in small to medium sized buildings requiring seismic retrofit without the need for heavy equipment. Construction utilizes commonly stocked materials able to be customized for required strength, drift, and geometry limitations. Analytical single degree of freedom (SDOF) and Euler buckling models are compared with published equations to determine the required restrainer stiffness (RRS). SDOF models yield RRS values 200% higher than the Euler …

A Feasibility Study Of Model-Based Natural Ventilation Control In A Midrise Student Dormitory Building, Steven James Gross

Dissertations and Theses

Past research has shown that natural ventilation can be used to satisfy upwards of 98% of the yearly cooling demand when utilized in the appropriate climate zone. Yet widespread implementation of natural ventilation has been limited in practice. This delay in market adoption is mainly due to lack of effective and reliable control. Historically, control of natural ventilation was left to the occupant (i.e. they are responsible for opening and closing their windows) because occupants are more readily satisfied when given control of the indoor environment. This strategy has been shown to be effective during summer months, but can lead …

The Role Of Feedback In The Assimilation Of Information In Prediction Markets, Richard Donald Jolly

Dissertations and Theses

Leveraging the knowledge of an organization is an ongoing challenge that has given rise to the field of knowledge management. Yet, despite spending enormous sums of organizational resources on Information Technology (IT) systems, executives recognize there is much more knowledge to harvest. Prediction markets are emerging as one tool to help extract this tacit knowledge and make it operational. Yet, prediction markets, like other markets, are subject to pathologies (e.g., bubbles and crashes) which compromise their accuracy and may discourage organizational use.

The techniques of experimental economics were used to study the characteristics of prediction markets. Empirical data was gathered …

A Functional Approach To Memory-Safe Operating Systems, Rebekah Leslie

Dissertations and Theses

Purely functional languages--with static type systems and dynamic memory management using garbage collection--are a known tool for helping programmers to reduce the number of memory errors in programs. By using such languages, we can establish correctness properties relating to memory-safety through our choice of implementation language alone. Unfortunately, the language characteristics that make purely functional languages safe also make them more difficult to apply in a low-level domain like operating systems construction. The low-level features that support the kinds of hardware manipulations required by operating systems are not typically available in memory-safe languages with garbage collection. Those that are provided …

Congressional Authority To Interpret The Thirteenth Amendment: A Response To Professor Tsesis, Jennifer Mason Mcaward

Journal Articles

This essay explores the proper scope of Congress’s power to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude. It reviews the historical context surrounding the drafting of the Thirteenth Amendment enforcement power, and it points to structural constitutional considerations relevant to the understanding of that power. It concludes by suggesting some related topics that deserve further exploration.

Child Support Guidelines: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Margaret F. Brinig, Douglas W. Allen

Journal Articles

Child support guideline systems do more than simply determine the amount of income to be transferred from the noncustodial to the custodial household. They create incentives, one way or another, for spouses to divorce and seek custody and support payments. We examine three cases found in North America, and find that the common method of income shares provides a decent guideline that does not create any perverse incentives for divorce. Percentage-of-obligor-income methods do worse than other systems, and can cause increases in divorce rates for families in which one spouse earns a high income. Finally, the Canadian system, which is …

Gender Bias In Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Referrals For Treatment, Stephanie Behrens

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

No abstract provided.

Sirna-Mediated Inhibition Of The Hiv-1 Transactivator Of Transcription, Alexander Jureka, Pricilla Simon, William Jackson

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

No abstract provided.

Anxiety, Knowledge And Help: A Model For How Black And White College Students Search For Hiv/Aids Information On The Internet, Kim Smith

The Qualitative Report

Using the "think aloud" protocol, which allows for the collection of data in real time, the researcher audio taped comments from 13 white college students from a predominately white university in the Southeastern United States and 15 black students from a predominately black university, as they explained how they searched for HIV/AIDS information on the Internet. A grounded theory analysis of the tapes revealed a three-stage model that students progressed through as they searched for HIV/AIDS information on the Internet. That model also revealed that all of the white students searched for general information about HIV/AIDS on the Internet, while …

Teaching Qualitative Research For Human Services Students: A Three-Phase Model, Ruhama Goussinsky, Arie Reshef, Galit Yanay-Ventura, Dalit Yassour-Borochowitz

The Qualitative Report

Qualitative research is an inherent part of the human services profession, since it emphasizes the great and multifaceted complexity characterizing human experience and the sociocultural context in which humans act. In the department of human services at Emek Yezreel College, Israel, we have developed a three-phase model to ensure a relatively intense exposure to and practice in qualitative methodology. While in the first phase students are exposed to the qualitative thinking and writing, they are required in the second phase to take a Qualitative Research Methods course that includes practice. The third and final phase includes conducting a qualitative research …

The Quipped Project: Exploring Relevance And Rigor Of Action Research Using Established Principles And Criteria, Christine Chapman, Margo Paterson, Jennifer M. Medves

The Qualitative Report

This paper is the last in a series of three manuscripts published in the TQR journal over the past few years. This work is part of a larger program of research that has been carried out by a team of researchers detailing various aspects of a three year action research project carried out from 2005 and 2008. This particular paper addresses issues of quality in action research by critiquing our research against five interdependent principles and criteria raised in the literature specifically by Davison, Martinson and Kock which was published in 2004. Our action research project aimed to facilitate interprofessional …

Utilizing Microsoft® Office To Produce And Present Recursive Frame Analysis Findings, Ronald J. Chenail, Maureen Duffy

The Qualitative Report

Although researchers conducting qualitative descriptive studies, ethnographies, phenomenologies, grounded theory, and narrative inquiries commonly use computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) to manage their projects and analyses, investigators conducting discursive methodologies such as discourse or conversation analysis seem to find such software packages not as useful. In our work with Recursive Frame Analysis (RFA), a systemic approach to the analysis of text and talk, we have taken a slightly different route by utilizing Microsoft® Office applications to produce and present our RFA findings. In the paper we describe RFA, explain how we use Word and PowerPoint to carry out RFA's …