Digital Commons Network^™

Sustainable Lakeshore Tourism, Adam Bishop

Landscape Architecture Theses

This thesis examines the importance of urban lakeshore waterfronts for they are merely large wetlands, that play a crucial role in maintaining eco-balance, protecting bio-diversity, and replenishing underground water sources. In addition to numerous social functions and relaxation, they can provide economic development in the form of sustainable tourism as well as prosperous destinations undulating ‘sense of place’. Extensive study and analysis of this valuable resource will provide indicators on how to integrate water, land, and urban needs of a declining waterfront in a harmonious fashion. Excelsior, Minnesota located on Lake Minnetonka has a rich tradition of tourism. This design …

On The Fringe, Steven Eggert

Landscape Architecture Theses

When communities fail to plan, there is no institutional framework where development can progress. This leaves little opportunity for expansion or modification based on changing needs. The establishment of a common vision is vital to the future development of Fargo’s fringe. It provides a synthesis of enhancements from an economic perspective to happiness and well being. This project seeks to define that spirit of place using practices of preservation and restoration of Fargo’s community.

Isolated Urban Places & Spaces: A Rails-With-Trails Solution (Fargo, Nd), Alex Bossert

Landscape Architecture Theses

This thesis focuses on exploring the question: how can a pedestrian trail along an active railway corridor unite several isolated areas of a city? The typology for exploring this project is an urban railway system that runs through the heart of downtown Fargo, North Dakota, and surrounding neighborhoods. Planning and designing within an existing built environment to better suit the well-being of the pedestrian may prove problematic, because urban growth has revolved around the automobile for nearly a century. Utilizing spaces along railway corridors may provide direct connections to destinations, making for a more cohesive urban fabric. An urban pedestrian …

Heritage | Heart Of The Community, Christa Pojanowski

Landscape Architecture Theses

This thesis explores small urban city revitalization. When small cities outlast the function of their own infrastructure, city revitalization needs to focus on how the city is functioning overall. City infrastructure is the basis for structure and function of a city. City revitalization plays an important part in reorganizing the forms and patterns of a city to create networks and connections for a successfully functioning community.

Resurgent Ecologies: A Blue Design, Samantha Lott

Landscape Architecture Theses

This thesis explores a waterless neighborhood in Las Vegas. “Blue design” explores water conservation efforts through design and community planning. The intent of this project is to identify new and innovative ways to retain water on a neighborhood scale that in turn helps hydrate the greater Las Vegas area.

Gi Joe: Green Infrastructure For The Average Joe, Zachary Swanson

Landscape Architecture Theses

The landscape that supports our cities is often invisible to its inhabitants. This thesis examines how landscape infrastructure can communicate in our lives. The fabric of our cities stitches together the intricate systems we need to sustain our communities. Transportation of goods and services is made possible by a collection of roads, sewers, pipes, power plants, and wires that make up this fabric. How can we integrate green infrastructure into the existing ecological functions of the city? How can these functions intertwine and work cohesively? Suburban environments have the potential to reflect the new urban systems of high-performance landscapes. These …

Motivational And Adaptational Factors Of Successful Women Engineers, Susan Edith Bornsen

Education

It is no surprise that there is a shortage of women engineers. The reasons for the shortage have been researched and discussed in myriad papers, and suggestions for improvement continue to evolve. However, there are few studies that have specifically identified the positive aspects that attract women to engineering and keep them actively engaged in the field. This paper examines how women engineers view their education, their work, and their motivation to remain in the field. A qualitative research design was used to understand the motivation and adaptability factors women use to support their decision to major in engineering and …

The Association Between Factors Affecting Enrollment Decisions In Manufacturing Occupational Clusters In Two-Year Colleges, Ralph J. Karl

Education

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationships between factors that affect student enrollment decisions in manufacturing occupational programs in two-year colleges and to describe current enrollment status of these programs. This purpose was pursued by five hypotheses and one research question that addressed the categorical factors that affect student enrollment decisions in a diversity of academic programs in higher education. These factors are: awareness; influence; recruitment; and socioeconomic status. Quantitative data were gathered through an online survey instrument. The target populations were full time instructors, academic advisors, and program directors of manufacturing occupational programs in two-year colleges …

Multisine Excitation Design To Increase The Efficiency Of System Identification Signal Generation And Analysis, Michael J. Schmitz

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Reducing sample frequencies in measurement systems can save power, but reduction to the point of undersampling results in aliasing and possible signal distortion. Nonlinearities of the system under test can also lead to distortions prior to measurement. In this dissertation, a first algorithm is presented for designing multisine excitation signals that can be undersampled without distortion from the aliasing of excitation frequencies or select harmonics. Next, a second algorithm is presented for designing undersampled distributions that approximate target frequency distributions. Results for pseudo-logarithmically-spaced frequency distributions designed for undersampling without distortion from select harmonics show a considerable decrease in the required …

Wireless Health Monitor Design, Kostyantyn V. Koziy

Electrical and Computer Engineering

In this thesis, a Wireless Health Monitor system for novel spacesuit verification and tests is presented. This system monitors the operator's health-related vital parameters and incorporates data acquisition, collecting and processing, wireless transmission, data displaying and logging. Power-saving technics for battery-powered applications are incorporated. A proprietary communication protocol for multi-node wireless network is developed and integrated. An embedded web interface for system control and data monitoring is utilized to achieve platform independence and reliability. Calculations and simulation results for the algorithms developed for gas flow measurements are presented. Packaging for this system, sensor calibration procedures, final device characteristics, specifications and …

Community-Level Response Of Coastal Microbial Biofilms To Ocean Acidification In A Natural Carbon Dioxide Vent Ecosystem., Ian Lidbury, Vivienne Johnson, Jason M. Hall-Spencer, Colin B. Munn, Michael Cunliffe

School of Biological and Marine Sciences

The impacts of ocean acidification on coastal biofilms are poorly understood. Carbon dioxide vent areas provide an opportunity to make predictions about the impacts of ocean acidification. We compared biofilms that colonised glass slides in areas exposed to ambient and elevated levels of pCO(2) along a coastal pH gradient, with biofilms grown at ambient and reduced light levels. Biofilm production was highest under ambient light levels, but under both light regimes biofilm production was enhanced in seawater with high pCO(2). Uronic acids are a component of biofilms and increased significantly with high pCO(2). Bacteria and Eukarya denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis …

Administrative Evaluation Of Online Faculty In Community Colleges, Douglas Duane Darling

Education

Policy and procedure haven’t kept up with institutional practices at community colleges. With over 5.5 million college students taking online courses, 29% of college students are taking an online course. As student numbers taking online courses have increased, so have the number of faculty teaching online. The purpose of this study is to determine if and how community college, online, faculty are administratively evaluated. The Chief Academic Officer (CAO) of the members of the American Association of Community Colleges were surveyed to determine the factors considered relevant for online, asynchronous, administrative evaluation of faculty that are currently being used by …

A User Interface Prototype Of Test Support As-A-Service, Neha Kale

Computer Science

Cloud computing provides software as a service over the internet. With the increasing popularity of cloud applications, the development of error-free cloud-based applications that function reliably is necessary. Software development under the cloud computing model brings the advantage that new applications can be rapidly constructed by tailoring existing services. However, such a development model reduces the testability of the application. To address this problem the approach of Test Support as-a-Service (TSaaS) is proposed. This paper presents a user interface prototype for the TSaaS approach to investigate the feasibility of the proposed TSaaS approach. The paper presents the user interface design …

Fuzzy Decision Model For A Smart Grid, Muhammad Niamul Baqui

Computer Science

Electricity is vital for U.S. economy. Over the years, the demand and the usage of electricity have skyrocketed, but the electric transmission and distribution processes have been manual. The current work formulates an automated decision-making model for electric-grid resource allocation. Resource allocation is primarily in the form of assigning the best power source to a sink. The model is built in Fuzzy Logic. The input parameters for the model are the power capacity, the price and the distance. A rule base has been created by domain knowledge and analyzing an operator decision making activity. The Mamdani Min-Max approach of is …

Investigation Of The Effect Of The Number Of Inspectors On The Software Defect Estimates, Kaustubh Saxena

Computer Science

Capture-recapture models help software managers by providing post-inspection defect estimate remaining in a software artifact to determine if a re-inspection in necessary. These estimates are calculated using the number of unique faults per inspector and the overlap of faults found by inspectors during an inspection cycle. A common belief is that the accuracy of the capture-recapture estimates improves with the inspection team size. This however, has not been empirically studied. This paper empirically investigates the effect of the number of inspectors on the estimates produced by capture-recapture models, by using inspection data with varying number and types of inspectors. The …

Application Of The Kusumoto Cost-Metric To Evaluate The Cost-Effectiveness Of Software Inspections, Narendar Reddy Mandala

Computer Science

Inspection and testing are two widely recommended techniques for software quality improvement with a common goal of defect detection and removal in software products. While testing cannot be conducted until software is implemented, inspections can be applied in early stages of software development. In this way inspection enables saving of testing cost and time. To manage the quality of their software, project managers need objective information to make a trade-off between the testing costs saved by performing inspections against the testing cost that would otherwise be spent if no inspections were performed. Project managers also need to decide on the …

An Investigation Of Integration And Performance Issues Related To The Use Of Extended Page Sizes In Computationally Intensive Applications, Matthew James Piehl

Computer Science

The combination of increasing fabrication density and corresponding decrease in price has resulted in the ability of commodity platforms to support large memory capacities. Processor designers have introduced support for extended hardware page sizes to assist operating systems with efficiently scaling to these memory capacities. This paper will explore integration strategies the designers of the Linux operating system have used to access this hardware support and the practical performance impact of using this support. This paper also provides a review of common strategies for adding support for this functionality at the application level. These strategies are applied to a sampling …

Mining Association Rules In Cloud, Pallavi Roy

Computer Science

The association rule mining was implemented in Hadoop. An association rule mining helps in finding relation between the items or item sets in the given data. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated by testing it in the cloud (EC2) by increasing the number of nodes in the testing set up. The association rules are developed on the basis of the frequent item set generated from the data. The frequent item set were generated following the Apriori algorithm. As the input data and number of distinct items in the data set is large, lots of space and memory is required, …

The Simultaneous Evacuation Of A Midwestern Community's Multiple Healthcare Facilities During A Major Flood Event: A Study In Decision-Making And Implementation, Azad Berwari

Emergency Management

Natural disasters are a part of the ecological system, so they are beyond human control. To reduce devastating effects, researchers in Emergency Management seek to understand the causes and cycles of natural disasters so that warning systems may be improved and better advice may be given to the general public about protecting themselves and their property. Emergency management is a relatively new discipline, so much research is still needed to understand the complex interaction of human activity and the natural environment. Therefore, this study was designed to explore the impact of the 2009 flood on the healthcare system in Fargo, …

An Investigation Of Mechanics Of Collagen And Fibril In Bone And Interactions In Swelling Clays: A Molecular And Multiscale Modeling Study, Shashindra Man Pradhan

Engineering

A fundamental study of the mechanics at the molecular scale and bridging it to the continuum level through multiscale modeling is the focus of this work. This work investigates how the material properties of nanoscale systems are influenced by the nonbonded interactions and molecular conformations. The molecular model is then bridged with the finite element model to link mechanics at nanoscale with the continuum scale. This work provides an unprecedented insight into how the interactions at the molecular scale influence mechanical properties at higher scales. Two materials are considered for the molecular modeling study: bone and Na-montmorillonite swelling clay. Bone …

Cellular Retrograde Cardiomyoplasty And Relaxin Therapy For Postischemic Myocardial Repair In A Rat Model, Gabriella Di Lascio, Guy Harmelin, Mattia Targetti, Cristina Nanni, Giacomo Bianchi, Tommaso Gasbarri, Sandro Gelsomino, Daniele Bani, Sandra Zecchi Orlandini, Massimo Bonacchi

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

We sought to determine whether skeletal myoblasts, wild-type or engineered to express relaxin, might improve myocardial viability and performance in a rat model of chronic myocardial infarction. Our purpose was to investigate a potential new therapy for heart failure.

From October 2005 through September 2009, we surgically induced acute myocardial infarction in 80 male Wistar rats. Thirty days after surgery, the rats underwent reoperation for the retrograde coronary venous infusion of skeletal myoblasts, relaxin, or both. The animals were randomly assigned to 4 experimental groups: R1 (the control group, which underwent saline-solution infusion), R2 (systemic relaxin therapy), R3 (myoblast infusion), …

A Comparative Study For Performance Evaluation Of Sit-To-Stand Task With Body Worn Sensor And Existing Laboratory Methods, Rahul Soangra, Thurmon E. Lockhart

Physical Therapy Faculty Articles and Research

Human movement such as sit-to-stand (STS) is one of the most fundamental and essential movement among daily living activities. Elderly who are unable to stand are severely limited in daily activities and rely on others for their care. In the coming next two decades about 20% of US population will be above the age of 65 years, and considering ever-increasing elderly population and health care expenses, the rehabilitation of functionally limited elderly is becoming a topic of greater concern. Clinically STS movement is looked upon with great interest, such as its analysis is meaningful in order to evaluate motor control …

Biological Autonomy, A. Grandpierre, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

We argue that genuine biological autonomy, or described at human level as free will, requires taking into account quantum vacuum processes in the context of biological teleology. One faces at least three basic problems of genuine biological autonomy: (1) if biological autonomy is not physical, where does it come from? (2) Is there a room for biological causes? And (3) how to obtain a workable model of biological teleology? It is shown here that the solution of all these three problems is related to the quantum vacuum. We present a short review of how this basic aspect of the fundamentals …

Impact Of Vegetation On Land-Atmosphere Coupling Strength And Its Implication For Desertification Mitigation Over East Asia, Boksoon Myoung, Yong-Sang Choi, Suk-Jin Choi, Seon Ki Park

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Desertification of the East Asian drylands and the consequent dust transport have been serious concerns for adjacent Asian countries as well as the western United States. Tree planting has been considered one applicable strategy to mitigate the desertification. However, the desired effect of the tree planting would not be brought to fruition unless the newly planted trees change the coupling characteristics between the land and the atmosphere. Based on this perception, we attempt to clarify the effects of vegetation on the coupling strength between the atmosphere and land surface, and we suggest the most efficient areas of tree planting for …

White Noise Based Stochastic Calculus Associated With A Class Of Gaussian Processes, Daniel Alpay, Haim Attia, David Levanony

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Using the white noise space setting, we define and study stochastic integrals with respect to a class of stationary increment Gaussian processes. We focus mainly on continuous functions with values in the Kondratiev space of stochastic distributions, where use is made of the topology of nuclear spaces. We also prove an associated Ito formula.

An Interpolation Problem For Functions With Values In A Commutative Ring, Daniel Alpay, Haim Attia

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

It was recently shown that the theory of linear stochastic systems can be viewed as a particular case of the theory of linear systems on a certain commutative ring of power series in a countable number of variables. In the present work we study an interpolation problem in this setting. A key tool is the principle of permanence of algebraic identities.

The Shape Of Things To Come: What We Can Learn From Patent Claim Length, Kristen Jakobsen Osenga

Law Faculty Publications

Technology is always changing. Patent law is also constantly evolving, as the courts and Congress continue to make significant changes to this area of law. But what about patents themselves? Some studies have looked at how patent specifications have changed over time, but no one has looked specifically at the most important aspect of a patent, its claims. Given the changes in technology and law, one would anticipate patent claims to have evolved.

Despite the expectations, this paper concludes that patent claim shape is largely unaffected by time, technology, crowded fields, or prosecution time. This paper suggests a possible reason …

Low-Complexity Soft-Decision Feedback Turbo Equalization For Multilevel Modulations, Huang Lou

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation proposes two new decision feedback equalization schemes suitable for multilevel modulation systems employing turbo equalization. One is soft-decision feedback equalization (SDFE) that takes into account the reliability of both soft a priori information and soft decisions of the data symbols. The proposed SDFE exhibits lower signal to noise ratio (SNR) threshold that is required for "water fall" bit error rate (BER) and much faster convergence than the near-optimal exact minimum mean square error linear equalizer (Exact-MMSE-LE) for high-order constellation modulations. The proposed SDFE also offers a low computational complexity compared to the Exact-MMSE-LE. The drawback of the SDFE …

Google Books: Finally, An Actual Fair Use Ruling!, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

One of our favorite topics in this Intellectual Property Issues series – perhaps the favorite – is Google Books, the massive project through which Google hopes to bring its search capability to the text of all books in the English language. To make a book’s text searchable, however, Google must scan the book. And scanning is copying. And copying usually means copyright infringement. Certainly the many authors and publishers who have sued Google take this view.

There are two ways to avoid infringement when copying a copyrighted book: get a license or prove that the copying constitutes fair use. Many …

5-Axis Tool Path Generation With Collision Detection For Finish Machining Of Freeform Surfaces, Jomy Francis

Masters Theses

"Research in the field of Tool path generation for freeform surfaces has been done intensively in the past. However, the main challenge that still exists is the computational efficiency related to the tool path generation. Tool path generation for freeform surface involves instantaneous calculation of new tool orientations which does not collide with the neighboring surfaces. Since the collision check of tool and neighboring surface is done repetitively at every instant of the tool, the calculations at every instant are to be computationally as easy as possible.

This thesis is composed of one paper. Paper I presents a novel extension …