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Mechanism And Kinetics Of Covalent Amide-Linked Adduct Formation In Solution And Solid Peptide Formulations, Michael Paul Dehart

Theses and Dissertations--Pharmacy

Peptides and proteins are prone to chemical and physical degradation in solutions and solids. One of the most common chemical degradation pathways involves deamidation of asparagine residues through a reactive succinimide intermediate resulting in the formation of aspartyl and isoaspartyl degradation products.

In this work, kinetic studies in aqueous solutions demonstrated that the succinimide intermediate is susceptible to attack by nucleophiles other than water. This may lead to a variety of alternative degradants. In solutions containing high concentrations of ammonia, the succinimide generated in the deamidation of the model peptides Phe-Asn-Gly and Phe-isoAsn-Gly underwent back-reaction with ammonia leading to peptide …

Profiling Executive Dysfunction In Adolescents With Autism, Nicole R. Rogers

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

Executive Functions (EF) have been assigned a causative role in a number of disorders, including schizophrenia, Tourette syndrome, autism, obsessive compulsive disorder, violent and criminal behavior, and nearly all learning disabilities. While the term executive functions in the professional literature easily yields more than 150 references, empirical research in which executive functions are studied and linked with specific disorders, such as autism, continues to help answer long-held questions about the disorder and adds to the literature base in order to better understand and treat the disorder. The purpose of this study was to review archival data collected using the Behavior …

Encyclopedia Of Snow, Ice And Glaciers, Vijay P. Singh, Pratap Singh, Umesh K. Haritashya

Department of Earth, Environment and Sustainability Faculty Publications

The objective of this encyclopedia is to present the current state of scientific understanding of various aspects of earth’s cryosphere – snow, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, ice shelves, sea ice, river and lake ice, and permafrost – and their related interdisciplinary connections under one umbrella. Therefore, every effort has been made to provide a comprehensive coverage of cryosphere by including a broad array of topics, such as the atmospheric processes responsible for snow formation; snowfall observations; snow cover and snow surveys; transformation of snow to ice and changes in their properties; classification of ice and glaciers and their worldwide …

A Basic Theory Of Benford’S Law, Arno Berger, Theodore P. Hill

Research Scholars in Residence

Drawing from a large, diverse body of work, this survey presents a comprehensive and unified introduction to the mathematics underlying the prevalent logarithmic distribution of significant digits and significands, often referred to as Benford’s Law (BL) or, in a special case, as the First Digit Law. The invariance properties that characterize BL are developed in detail. Special attention is given to the emergence of BL in a wide variety of deterministic and random processes. Though mainly expository in nature, the article also provides strengthened versions of, and simplified proofs for, many key results in the literature. Numerous intriguing problems …

Timing, Distribution, Amount, And Style Of Cenozoic Extension In The Northern Great Basin, Christopher D. Henry, Allen J. Mcgrew, Joseph P. Colgan, Arthur W. Snoke, Matthew E. Brueseke

Department of Earth, Environment and Sustainability Faculty Publications

This field trip examines contrasting lines of evidence bearing on the timing and structural style of Cenozoic (and perhaps late Mesozoic) extensional deformation in northeastern Nevada. Studies of metamorphic core complexes in this region report extension beginning in the early Cenozoic or even Late Cretaceous, peaking in the Eocene and Oligocene, and being largely over before the onset of “modern” Basin and Range extension in the middle Miocene. In contrast, studies based on low- temperature thermochronology and geologic mapping of Eocene and Miocene volcanic and sedimentary deposits report only minor, localized extension in the Eocene, no extension at all in …

Fully Nonlinear Boundary Value Problems With Impulse, Paul Eloe, Muhammad Usman

Mathematics Faculty Publications

An impulsive boundary value problem with nonlinear boundary conditions for a second order ordinary differential equation is studied. In particular, sufficient conditions are provided so that a compression- expansion cone theoretic fixed point theorem can be applied to imply the existence of positive solutions. The nonlinear forcing term is assumed to satisfy usual sublinear or superlinear growth as t → ∞ or t → 0 +. The nonlinear impulse terms and the nonlinear boundary terms are assumed to satisfy the analogous asymptotic behavior.

Prospective Teachers' Use Of Representations In Solving Statistical Tasks With Dynamic Statistical Software, Hollylynne Lee, Shannon O. Driskell, Suzanne R. Harper, Keith R. Leatham, Gladis Kersaint, Robin L. Angotti

Mathematics Faculty Publications

This study examined a random stratified sample (n=62) of prospective teachers' work across eight institutions on three tasks that utilized dynamic statistical software. Our work was guided by considering how teachers may utilize their statistical knowledge and technological statistical knowledge to engage in cycles of investigation. Although teachers did not tend to take full advantage of dynamic linking capabilities, they utilized a large variety of graphical representations and often added statistical measures or other augmentations to graphs as part of their analysis.

Non-Normality Points Of Β X\X, William Fleissner, Lynne Yengulalp

Mathematics Faculty Publications

We seek conditions implying that (β X\X) \ {y} is not normal. Our main theorem: Assume GCH and all uniform ultrafilters are regular. If X is a locally compact metrizable space without isolated points, then (β X\X) \ {y} is not normal for all y ∈ β X\X. In preparing to prove this theorem, we generalize the notions “uniform”, “regular”, and “good” from set ultrafilters to z-ultrafilters. We discuss non-normality points of the product of a discrete space and the real line. We topologically embed a nonstandard real line into the remainder of this product space.

Algorithms For Area Preserving Flows, Catherine Kublik, Selim Esedoglu, Jeffrey A. Fessler

Mathematics Faculty Publications

We propose efficient and accurate algorithms for computing certain area preserving geometric motions of curves in the plane, such as area preserving motion by curvature. These schemes are based on a new class of diffusion generated motion algorithms using signed distance functions. In particular, they alternate two very simple and fast operations, namely convolution with the Gaussian kernel and construction of the distance function, to generate the desired geometric flow in an unconditionally stable manner. We present applications of these area preserving flows to large scale simulations of coarsening.

Upper And Lower Solutions For Regime-Switching Diffusions With Applications In Financial Mathematics, Paul W. Eloe, R. H. Liu

Mathematics Faculty Publications

This paper develops a method of upper and lower solutions for a general system of second-order ordinary differential equations with two-point boundary conditions. Our motivation of study stems from a class of financial mathematics problems under regime-switching diffusion models. Two examples are double barrier option valuation and optimal selling rules in asset trading. We establish the existence of a unique C2 solution of the two-point boundary value problem. We construct monotone sequences of upper and lower solutions that are shown to converge to the unique solution of the boundary value problem. This construction provides a feasible numerical method to compute …

Optimal Intervals For Uniqueness Of Solutions For Nonlocal Boundary Value Problems, Paul W. Eloe, Johnny Henderson

Mathematics Faculty Publications

For the nth order differential equation (see PDF for equation) we obtain optimal bounds on the length of intervals on which solutions are unique for certain nonlocal three point boundary value problems. These bounds are obtained through an application of the Pontryagin Maximum Principle from the theory of optimal control.

2011 Program And Abstracts, University Of Dayton. Department Of Mathematics

Undergraduate Mathematics Day: Programs, Lectures, Promotional Materials

Program and abstracts of papers presented at the 2011 Undergraduate Mathematics Day held at the University of Dayton.

Perfect And Abundant Numbers - A Perfect And Abundant Source For Undergraduate Research Projects (Abstract), Judy Holdener

Undergraduate Mathematics Day: Programs, Lectures, Promotional Materials

In June of 2009, the 47th perfect number was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a collaborative computing project involving volunteers from all over the world. Like all known perfect numbers before it, this number is even. Does an odd perfect number exist? Are there infinitely many perfect numbers?

Innovative Pollutant Load Monitoring, Eric Gurr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Modern streamflow measuring equipment, water quality sampling techniques and a better understanding of pollutant washoff are continuously being developed as today's society is in critical need of improving water management, minimizing developmental impacts and preventing environmental hazards. In particular, the study of the spatial, temporal and volumetric characteristics of annual pollutant loading caused by variations in precipitation, land use and other anthropogenic factors is of great significance due to their relation to future global water demands. The research presented here falls in three parts. In the first part of the dissertation, an acoustical Doppler velocity profiler installed in a submerged …

A Configural Approach To Patient Safety Climate: The Relationship Between Climate Profile Characteristics And Patient Outcomes, Sallie J. Weaver

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Patient safety climate is defined as a holistic snapshot of enacted work environment practices and procedures related to patient safety, derived from shared perceptions of social and environmental work characteristics. While patient safety climate has been touted as a critical factor underlying safe patient care, our understanding of input factors influencing shared climate perceptions and, in turn, the effects of climate as a collective, group-level construct on important outcomes remains underdeveloped, both theoretically and empirically. Therefore, the current study examines (1) the antecedents that impact individual patient safety climate perceptions and (2) the relationships between hospital unit patient safety climate …

Modeling And Characterization Of Acute Stress Under Dynamic Task Conditions, Angel M. Millan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stress can be defined as the mental, physical, and emotional response of humans to stressors encountered in their personal or professional environment. Stressors are introduced in various activities, especially those found in dynamic task conditions when multiple task requirements must be performed. Stress and stressors have been described as activators and inhibitors of human performance. The ability to manage high levels of acute stress is an important determinant of successful performance in any occupation. In situations where performance is critical, personnel must be prepared to operate successfully under hostile or extreme stress conditions; therefore training programs and engineered systems must …

Design And Operation Of Stationary Distributed Battery Micro-Storage Systems, Ala R. Al-Haj Hussein

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Due to some technical and environmental constraints, expanding the current electric power generation and transmission system is being challenged by even increasing the deployment of distributed renewable generation and storage systems. Energy storage can be used to store energy from utility during low-demand (off-peak) hours and deliver this energy back to the utility during high-demand (on-peak) hours. Furthermore, energy storage can be used with renewable sources to overcome some of their limitations such as their strong dependence on the weather conditions, which cannot be perfectly predicted, and their unmatched or out-of-synchronization generation peaks with the demand peaks. Generally, energy storage …

Ray Collection Bounding Volume Hierarchy, Kris Krishna Rivera

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents Ray Collection BVH, an improvement over a current day Ray Tracing acceleration structure to both build and perform the steps necessary to efficiently render dynamic scenes. Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) is a commonly used acceleration structure, which aides in rendering complex scenes in 3D space using Ray Tracing by breaking the scene of triangles into a simple hierarchical structure. The algorithm this thesis explores was developed in an attempt at accelerating the process of both constructing this structure, and also using it to render these complex scenes more efficiently. The idea of using "ray collection" as a …

Techniques For Boosting The Performance In Content-Based Image Retrieval Systems, Ning Yu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Content-Based Image Retrieval has been an active research area for decades. In a CBIR system, one or more images are used as query to search for similar images. The similarity is measured on the low level features, such as color, shape, edge, texture. First, each image is processed and visual features are extract. Therefore each image becomes a point in the feature space. Then, if two images are close to each other in the feature space, they are considered similar. That is, the k nearest neighbors are considered the most similar images to the query image. In this K-Nearest Neighbor …

Modeling Human Group Behavior In Virtual Worlds, Fahad Shah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Virtual worlds and massively-multiplayer online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. They provide new outlets for human social interaction that differ from both face-to-face interactions and non-physically-embodied social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. We aim to study group dynamics in these virtual worlds by collecting and analyzing public conversational patterns of users grouped in close physical proximity. To do this, we created a set of tools for monitoring, partitioning, and analyzing unstructured conversations between changing groups of participants …

Effective Task Transfer Through Indirect Encoding, Phillip Verbancsics

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An important goal for machine learning is to transfer knowledge between tasks. For example, learning to play RoboCup Keepaway should contribute to learning the full game of RoboCup soccer. Often approaches to task transfer focus on transforming the original representation to fit the new task. Such representational transformations are necessary because the target task often requires new state information that was not included in the original representation. In RoboCup Keepaway, changing from the 3 vs. 2 variant of the task to 4 vs. 3 adds state information for each of the new players. In contrast, this dissertation explores the idea …

Resource Banking An Energy-Efficient, Run-Time Adaptive Processor Design Technique, Jacob Staples

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From the earliest and simplest scalar computation engines to modern superscalar out-oforder processors, the evolution of computational machinery during the past century has largely been driven by a single goal: performance. In today’s world of cheap, billion-plus transistor count processors and with an exploding market in mobile computing, a design landscape has emerged where energy efficiency, arguably more than any other single metric, determines the viability of a processor for a given application. The historical emphasis on performance has left modern processors bloated and over provisioned for everyday tasks in the hope that during computationally intensive periods some performance improvement …

Cfd Analysis Of A Uni-Directional Impulse Turbine For Wave Energy Conversion, Carlos Alberto Velez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ocean energy research has grown in popularity in the past decade and has produced various designs for wave energy extraction. This thesis focuses on the performance analysis of a uni-directional impulse turbine for wave energy conversion. Uni-directional impulse turbines can produce uni-directional rotation in bi-directional flow, which makes it ideal for wave energy extraction as the motion of ocean waves are inherently bi-directional. This impulse turbine is currently in use in four of the world’s Oscillating Wave Columns (OWC). Current research to date has documented the performance of the turbine but little research has been completed to understand the flow …

Labeled Sampling Consensus A Novel Algorithm For Robustly Fitting Multiple Structures Using Compressed Sampling, Carl J. Messina

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ability to robustly fit structures in datasets that contain outliers is a very important task in Image Processing, Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision. Random Sampling Consensus or RANSAC is a very popular method for this task, due to its ability to handle over 50% outliers. The problem with RANSAC is that it is only capable of finding a single structure. Therefore, if a dataset contains multiple structures, they must be found sequentially by finding the best fit, removing the points, and repeating the process. However, removing incorrect points from the dataset could prove disastrous. This thesis offers a novel …

Data-True Characterization Of Neuronal Models, Jose Suarez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, a weighted least squares approach is initially presented to estimate the parameters of an adaptive quadratic neuronal model. By casting the discontinuities in the state variables at the spiking instants as an impulse train driving the system dynamics, the neuronal output is represented as a linearly parameterized model that depends on filtered versions of the input current and the output voltage at the cell membrane. A prediction errorbased weighted least squares method is formulated for the model. This method allows for rapid estimation of model parameters under a persistently exciting input current injection. Simulation results show the …

Impurity And Interdiffusion In The Magnesium-Aluminum System, Sarah Tiffany Brennan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Magnesium alloys offer a base of lightweight engineering materials for electronic, military and transportation applications where weight reduction is crucial for higher efficiency. Understanding fundamental diffusion behavior in Mg alloys elicits better materials properties through the optimization of processing techniques and heat treatments, whose material responses are affected by diffusion. The main objective of this study is to provide a clear, comprehensive description of the diffusion behavior in the technically important magnesium-aluminum binary metallic system. In this study, diffusion in the Mg-Al system was observed through solid diffusion couples and thin film specimens in the temperature range of 673-523K. The …

Robustness Analysis For Turbomachinery Stall Flutter, Md Moinul Forhad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Flutter is an aeroelastic instability phenomenon that can result either in serious damage or complete destruction of a gas turbine blade structure due to high cycle fatigue. Although 90% of potential high cycle fatigue occurrences are uncovered during engine development, the remaining 10% stand for one third of the total engine development costs. Field experience has shown that during the last decades as much as 46% of fighter aircrafts were not mission-capable in certain periods due to high cycle fatigue related mishaps. To assure a reliable and safe operation, potential for blade flutter must be eliminated from the turbomachinery stages. …

Optimal Detour Planning Around Blocked Construction Zones, Mutasem Jardaneh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Construction zones are traffic way areas where construction, maintenance or utility work is identified by warning signs, signals and indicators, including those on transport devices that mark the beginning and end of construction zones. Construction zones are among the most dangerous work areas, with workers facing workplace safety challenges that often lead to catastrophic injuries or fatalities. In addition, daily commuters are also impacted by construction zone detours that affect their safety and daily commute time. These problems represent major challenges to construction planners as they are required to plan vehicle routes around construction zones in such a way that …

Modeling, Design And Fabrication Of Orthogonal And Psuedo-Orthogonal Frequency Coded Saw Wireless Spread Spectrum Rfid Sensor Tags, Nancy Saldanha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors offer a wireless, passive sensor solution for use in numerous environments where wired sensing can be expensive and infeasible. Single carrier frequency SAW sensor embodiments such as delay lines, and resonators have been used in single sensor environments where sensor identification is not a necessity. The orthogonal frequency coded (OFC) SAW sensor tag embodiment developed at UCF uses a spread spectrum approach that allows interrogation in a multi-sensor environment and provides simultaneous sensing and sensor identi- fication. The SAW device is encoded via proper design of multiple Bragg reflectors at differing frequencies. To enable accurate …

Incremental Lifecycle Validation Of Knowledge-Based Systems Through Commonkads, Feras Batarseh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation introduces a novel validation method for knowledge-based systems (KBS). Validation is an essential phase in the development lifecycle of knowledge-based systems. Validation ensures that the system is valid, reliable and that it reflects the knowledge of the expert and meets the specifications. Although many validation methods have been introduced for knowledge-based systems, there is still a need for an incremental validation method based on a lifecycle model. Lifecycle models provide a general framework for the developer and a mapping technique from the system into the validation process. They support reusability, modularity and offer guidelines for knowledge engineers to …