Digital Commons Network^™

Blind Yield Detection In Steel Structure For Automatic Nondestructive Testing Using Ultrasonic Sensors, Hongting Zhang

LSU Master's Theses

Detection of yield zones using nondestructive testing (NDT) technology for assessing the structural integrity of the existing steel buildings/bridges is extremely important. The average energy over the “effective echoes” (in “good” signal quality) is a robust feature for the yield detection in steel structures. Nevertheless, this average-energy feature extraction requires rigorous manual data-acquisition and human operation. Therefore, in this thesis, we make the first-ever attempt to design a totally-blind and automatic steel-structure yielddetection mechanism, which requires neither the a priori information about the signal nor the human effort in calibration, operation, or data analysis. This new scheme is built upon …

Communication In Today's Network, Carter Jahncke Perrilliat

LSU Master's Theses

Technology has given us many ways of communicating. The most emerging and evolving network of exchanging information today is social media. Communicating in Today’s Network is a thesis that examines and explores different trends in social media. This body of this work is a result of data collected by surveying active users of social media in society. The results are visually communicated through information graphics. It is intended to inform designers of the importance in learning and identifying ways to communicate with our new developing medium, social media.

Three Essays On Tax Salience: Market Salience And Political Salience, David Gamage, Darien Shanske

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article analyzes the literatures on how individuals understand taxation (i.e., tax salience). We evaluate how taxpayers respond to different presentations of tax prices both in their roles as market participants and as voters. We aim to combat naïve notions about tax salience that currently exert a pernicious influence on tax lawmaking. In particular, we argue that it is normatively desirable for governments to reduce tax salience with respect to market decision making, and that there is nothing objectionable about governments reducing tax salience with respect to political decision making.

Using Payroll Deduction To Shelter Individual Health Insurance From Income Tax, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

In this article, Professor Orentlicher and his colleagues assess the impact of state laws requiring or encouraging employers to establish ‘‘section 125’’ cafeteria plans that shelter employees’ premium contributions from tax.

Beating The Red Stick, Tracey Anne Duncan

LSU Master's Theses

My thesis explores the history of Roller Derby, its modern revival, and the way that it changes the lives of the women who play it. From October 2009 to March 2011, I conducted ethnographic research and interviews with the Red Stick Roller Derby in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My perspective is that of an observer turned player, and the piece centers around my own story of personal transformation. This work is part cultural history, part ethnography, and part memoir, written from an explicitly feminist perspective.

The Legislative Process Is Not Fit For The Abortion Debate, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Temporal Changes In Quality Of Life And Environment In New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina, Danielle Johanna Larock

LSU Master's Theses

Understanding and assessing the spatial and temporal changes of quality of life and environment of a community is critical to its sustainable development, especially after a disaster strikes. This study explores an approach that integrates remote sensing with socioeconomic data to assess the temporal changes in quality of life and environment (QOL) using Orleans Parish as an example. Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005, has had vast implications economically, socially, and environmentally for this city and the surrounding area. Empirically quantifying these concepts will help to rebuild the city more sustainably. This study investigated change in environmental quality …

Sacrifice And Sacred Honor: Why The Constitution Is A "Suicide Pact", Peter Brandon Bayer

Scholarly Works

Most legal scholars and elected officials embrace the popular clich6 that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." Typically, those commentators extol the "Constitution of necessity," the supposition that Government, essentially the Executive, may take any action-may abridge or deny any fundamental right-to alleviate a sufficiently serious national security threat. The "Constitution of necessity" is wrong. This Article explains that strict devotion to the "fundamental fairness" principles of the Constitution's Due Process Clauses is America's utmost legal and moral duty, surpassing all other considerations, even safety, security and survival.

The analysis begins with the most basic premises: the definition of …

The Multi-Institutional Study Of Leadership At Lsu: How Participation In Specific Student Groups Affects One's Leadership, Courtney Elizabeth Lambert

LSU Master's Theses

Through statistical examination of the Multi-Institution Study of Leadership (MSL), conducted at Louisiana State University during the Spring of 2010, quantitative research sought to determine if different leadership outcomes are produced through membership in religious student organizations, multi-cultural fraternities and sororities, social fraternities and sororities, and intercollegiate or varsity athletic groups. The MSL is theoretically based on the Social Change Model of Leadership Development and the leadership outcomes it assesses are consciousness of self, congruence, commitment, collaboration, common purpose, controversy with civility, citizenship, and change. It was discovered that students in religious student organizations score better on many leadership outcomes, …

Effects Of Resistant Starch In Milk Replacer On Health And Performance In Neonatal Holstein Heifer Calves, Bethany Leann Fisher

LSU Master's Theses

Forty-two female Holstein calves were assigned to one of three treatments at d 2 of age to study the effects of adding resistant starch (RS) to the milk replacer on health and performance. Treatments were control (0g RS), 4g RS, or 8g RS mixed into the reconstituted milk replacer. Calves were housed in individual calf hutches and fed milk replacer once daily until d 42 of age. Water and an 18% crude protein calf starter were offered ad libitum beginning d 3 throughout the duration of the 56 d trial. Calves remained in their hutches until d 56 of age …

An Overview Of Green Jobs In The Louisiana Forest Sector, Ryan D. Olson

LSU Master's Theses

The term “green job” is a relatively new definition that defines employment activities that are likely to have occurred since the beginning of human existence. The push to identify, to quantify and to drive the growth of these jobs has recently been brought on by climate change and the depletion of Earth’s natural resources. According to the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, green jobs are either (a) Jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources or (b) Jobs in which workers’ duties involve making their establishment’s production …

Towards An Ethics Of Otherness: Re-Considering Birth, Time, And Silence In Education, Hillary Procknow

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The notion of the self in Western literature has overwhelmingly focused on separation and individuality, and has conflated knowing with being. This work proposes to retell the story of the modern Western individual through the themes of birth, time, and silence (as they represent the lifecycle), in an effort to locate the self as one who is called forth by the other, as discussed in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. By re-theorizing the moments of birth, time, and silence as moments of living for the other, rather than as moments in which selves become more autonomous, the self can be …

Testing And Improving The Luminosity Relations For Gamma-Ray Bursts, Andrew Collazzi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) have several luminosity relations where a measurable property of a burst light curve or spectrum is correlated with the burst luminosity. These luminosity relations are calibrated for the fraction of bursts with spectroscopic redshifts and hence the known luminosities. GRBs have thus become known as a type of "standard candle"; where standard candle is meant in the usual sense that their luminosities can be derived from measurable properties of the bursts. GRBs can therefore be used for the same cosmology applications as Type Ia supernovae, including the construction of the Hubble Diagram and measuring massive star …

Burgerville: Sustainability And Sourcing In A Qsr Supply Chain, Darrell Brown, Phil Berko, Patrick Dedrick, Brie Hilliard, Joshua Pfleeger

Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

Jack Graves is considering buying chicken. More precisely, Jack is considering where to buy chicken. He needs to make a recommendation to the purchasing team soon, and the decision is complicated. Jack is a long-time employee of the Burgerville restaurant chain, a quick-serve restaurant chain in the Northwest USA. Burgerville prides itself in being true to its long-held values while maintaining profitability and growth. Graves’ primary job at Burgerville is to assure that the company’s values are embedded in all its actions, including its relationships to its supply chain. His current concern is the dilemma of which values to promote. …

Tropical Salvage: From Recession To Expansion, Scott Marshall, Lisa Peifer, Erin Ferrigno

Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

Tim O’Brien, founder of Tropical Salvage, was preparing for another warehouse clearance sale of his unique, handcrafted hardwood furniture. It had been an enormously challenging year and it was important to reduce inventory before the next container arrived from Indonesia. The market for fine furniture had begun to decline steadily in early 2008 following the stock market crash of the prior September. The company survived a difficult period, but not without suffering a decline in sales. O’Brien had spent ten years building a sustainable business model based on environmental stewardship, worker empowerment and unique, high quality product. As the economy …

Essays On The Economics Of Crime, Duha T. Altindag

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation includes three essays on the application of economics to various aspects of crime and criminal activity. The research presented in this dissertation points out a cause and a consequence of crime as well as the possible influence of a law on criminal activity. The first chapter provides an introduction to the ways that economic reasoning can be used to analyze criminal activity. The second chapter examines individuals' gun carrying activity in the presence of concealed weapon laws. The results suggest that allowing law-abiding individuals to carry concealed handguns is more likely to reduce crime than to increase it. …

Surface-Initiated Polymerization As A Novel Strategy Towards Preparation Of Organic Semiconducting Polymer Thin Films, Euiyong Hwang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Organic semiconducting polymer thin films are core materials for organic electronics that are conventionally prepared by solution processing techniques. Despite having the advantage of easy and fast thin film manufacturing, solution techniques have intrinsic drawbacks, such as disordered and poor molecular organization in the film (often resulting in poor device performance), as well as insufficient stabilities of the films and resulting devices. To improve this situation, we designed a novel “bottom-up” fabrication of surface-immobilized organic semiconducting thin films through in situ polymerization. This new strategy will allow high degree of control over molecular organization which therefore results in improved free …

Revision And Reclassification Of The Genera Of Phalacridae (Coleoptera: Cucujoidea), Matthew Gimmel

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The family Phalacridae is monographed at the genus level using modern phylogenetic and classification methods. A morphological matrix of 106 characters and 2063 base pairs of aligned 18S rDNA sequence data were analyzed both separately and in a concatenated matrix, using maximum parsimony, Bayesian methods, and maximum likelihood. The phylogenetic hypotheses were used to construct a new subfamilial classification for the family. I recognize eight subfamilies, including two described as new: Biophytinae Guillebeau 1894, Eustilbinae Guillebeau 1892, Ochrolitinae Guillebeau 1894, Olibrinae Guillebeau 1892, Olibroporinae, subfam. nov., Olibrosominae, subfam. nov., Phaenocephalinae Matthews 1899, Phalacrinae Guillebeau 1892. Twenty-eight new generic synonymies are …

Unveiled Pandemonium, Christina Marie Johnson

LSU Master's Theses

Unveiled Pandemonium is a body of work that acknowledges my struggles, as a woman, with skewed self-perception and how frayed, decayed bits of self-love affect interaction with daily life: the public sphere versus the private. Using both large-scale graphite drawings and intimately sized, full-color digital narrative sequences, I portray movement, as a state of freedom, while capturing each character in a position of physical or emotional constraint. To increase the tension each figure interacts with another visually and in narrative; a war with the self begins. Within the engagement of internal and external tensions, each character’s body becomes a battlefield …

Estimating Greenhouse Gas Emissions In Louisiana At The Parish Scale, Quang Tran

LSU Master's Theses

The estimation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals from the atmosphere at the county scale is an interest to many local decision makers and scientists looking to plan, track, mitigate, or reduce concentrations at the local or regional level. This thesis presents a new approach in downscaling state-level emissions to contiguous county levels using the state of Louisiana as an example. Here, we applied the volume- preserving principle in an attempt to improve existing methods and fully characterize accurate GHG emissions at the county (i.e., parish) level. All six “Kyoto” GHG emissions related to sources and sectors were assessed …

Utilizing Near-Infrared Spectroscopy To Detect Sodium Tripolyphosphate In Treated Penaeus Aztecus And Setiferus Shrimp, Alisa Marlene Todd

LSU Master's Theses

Applying sodium tripolyphosphate to shrimp may cause excess water absorption and has become a major concern to phosphate producers, the consumer and regulatory agencies, such as, the United States Food and Drug Administration. The objective of this study was to examine Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy as a nondestructive and rapid method of detecting shrimp treated with sodium tripolyphosphate solutions of varying concentrations and treatment times. Wild caught Penaeus setiferus and aztecus Louisiana gulf coast shrimp were submerged in distilled water, 2.5% sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP), and 5% sodium tripolyphosphate solutions for 30, 60, 120, 240, 480, 960, 1920 minute time intervals. …

Social Work Students' Attitudes Toward Teenage Pregnancy Prevention: The Importance Of Religiosity And Feminist Ideology, Pilar Thompson Borne

LSU Master's Theses

Effective teenage pregnancy prevention is a topic of debate in current literature. Religiosity is frequently examined in the research, and studies typically assess associations between behavior patterns and level of religiosity. Feminist ideology is another theme found in the teenage pregnancy prevention literature that mainly examines how feminist perspectives contribute to effective prevention approaches. The current study examined the interrelationships among religiosity, feminist ideology and attitudes toward teenage pregnancy prevention. A self-report survey instrument was used to collect data from 69 MSW students, a sample surveyed for the first with the current study. A significant positive correlation was found between …

Conference: Laïcité In Comparative Perspective, Elisabeth Zoller, Marc O. Degirolami, Nina Crimm, Javier Martínez-Torrón

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Adams-Jefferson: An Inquiry Into Human, Nature, Politics, And The Implications For A Republic, Adetoyese Itunu Adedipe

LSU Master's Theses

If one were to inquire from Americans the names of five founding fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson will more often than not be mentioned amongst them. Apart from being among the founders of the republic, these two men presided over the republic as well. It is accurate to say both founding fathers were prolific writers who left behind a wealth of literature their progeny could look to when it came to the intricacies of politics and the nature of man. The aim of this thesis is to unveil the metamorphosis of a political order via the views and opinions …

Cost And Performance Modeling Of The Mu-Decoder, Raghavendra Kongari

LSU Master's Theses

In this thesis we study the implementation details of the MU-Decoders, a recently proposed hardware module that has been theoretically shown to be superior to other methods for generating subsets of large sets. Our study confirms this advantage. Specifically, we compare the performance of implementations of the LUT-Decoder (the most common configurable decoder) to the MU-Decoder. We show that for while the LUT-Decoder is slightly better than the MU-Decoder for arbitrary (and artificial) inputs, for a large class of inputs called totally ordered subsets, that have practical significance, the MU-Decoder is vastly superior in area to the LUT-Decoder. In terms …

The Tick Response To Rickettsial Dissemination During Typical And Atypical Rickettsial Infection, Piyanate Sunyakumthorn

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Ticks are the only disease vectors for spotted fever group (SFG) Rickettsia which are obligate intracellular bacteria belonging to the genus Rickettsia. In nature, ticks maintain the infection of SFG Rickettsia via vertical and horizontal transmission. However, the prevalence of rickettsial transmission is limited to certain species of ticks, and this limitation is known as a specific tick/Rickettsia relationship. Due to the continuous increase of tick-borne rickettsial disease cases in the United States, which contrasts with very low prevalence of Rickettsia in tick vectors, the study of vector competence of tick to Rickettsia is needed in order to understand the …

Promoting Employee Voice In The American Economy: A Call For Comprehensive Reform, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt

Articles by Maurer Faculty

It has become apparent that there are serious deficiencies in the American model of production. Our model of corporate governance has recently come under intense scrutiny in the academic literature and the popular press. There are increasing concerns that American corporations are too focused on short-run profits and stock prices, at the expense of long-term strategies and investments that would benefit the long-run value of the firm, employees, and the American economy at large. In the pursuit of short-run shareholder interests, American corporations have bestowed on senior executives enormous compensation packages that seem increasingly divorced from any notion of rationality, …

Information Dissemination For Farming Communities In Thailand, Khumphicha Tantisantisom

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The use of information and communication technology tools has been applied in many disciplines, including agricultural sectors. It may be applied in many modules such as data gathering, data processing, information management and information dissemination. One issue that cannot be neglected is the readiness of technology service users, or farmers in this case. It was found that most Thai farmers were poor and illiterate; therefore, offering them the best available tools and services may not be always what they would like to use. To answer the research questions, action research methodology was selected in this study to find a practical …

Determinants Of Knowledge Mapping Adoption In Software Maintenance, Joseph K. Lee

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Knowledge Maps (KMaps) could be ideally suited for resolving many of the traceability problems in computer software maintenance. This thesis provides an understanding of the various factors that will encourage or impede the software maintenance community to adopt KMaps as part of their process. ABC Company in Perth, Western Australia, was chosen as the research site because it is a multinational software development company with customers in many major cities around the world. Since Knowledge Mapping (KMapping) is relatively new to most software staffers, it was necessary to develop a Software Maintenance KMap prototype. A literature review of KMapping, innovation …

Stability Analysis Of Anchored Rock Slopes Against Plane Failure Subjected To Surcharge And Seismic Loads, Md M. Hossain

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The stability analysis of rock slopes has been a challenging task for engineers

because the rock mass constituting the slope often has discontinuities in various

forms, resulting in different types of slope failures. The plane failure is one of the

rock slope failures observed in field situations when the discontinuity is in the form

of joint planes. There are several parameters including surcharge and seismic loads

that govern the stability of the rock slope against plane failure in field projects. The

limit equilibrium approach for the estimation of the factor of safety of the rock slope

against plane failure has …