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The Effect Of Hsv-1 Infection On Differentiated And Polarized U937 Cells, Allolo Dreiwish Aldreiwish

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Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) challenges the host immune system through several mechanisms (Frey, et al., 2009). In vitro, U937 cells (human macrophage-like precursor cell line) are not susceptible to HSV-1 infection when they are not differentiating (Lopez-Guerrero and Alonso, 1997). Differentiation of these cells resistance can abrogates their resistance to HSV-1 (Tenney and Morahan, 1991). In this study, we examined the effect of HSV-1 infection on differentiated and polarized U937 cells. U937 cells are differentiated to M0 cells.

Then, M0 cells are polarized to distinct phenotypes, M1 or M2. M1 are proinflammatory macrophages while M2 are anti-inflammatory cells. …

The Molecular Genetics Learning Progressions: Revisions And Refinements Based On Empirical Testing In Three 10th Grade Classrooms, Amber Nicole Todd

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In the past few decades, there has been a large push for increasing scientific literacy (AAAS, 1989; AAAS, 1993; Achieve, 2013; NRC, 1996; NRC, 2012), especially in areas that are rapidly advancing, like molecular genetics. Much research has been done on student understandings of molecular genetics and the consensus is that the concepts are difficult both to learn and teach (Fisher, 1992; Horwitz, 1996; Kindfield, 1992; Lewis & Kattmann, 2004; Marbach-Ad & Stavy, 2000; Stewart et al., 2005; Venville & Treagust, 1998; etc.). Two learning progressions in molecular genetics have been produced (Duncan et al., 2009; Roseman et al. 2006), …

Libraries From Libraries Approach To The Synthesis Of Arylidene Oxindoles, Kyle James Knisley

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A libraries from libraries combinatorial chemistry approach was employed to synthesize fluorinated derivatives of both oxindoles and isatins as potential pharmaceuticals or targeting agents for imaging purposes related to cancer or Alzheimer's disease. Synthesis for these fluorinated derivatives are described by routes involving, either: a) N-alkylation of 5-substituted isatins followed by Wolff-Kishner reduction to the corresponding oxindoles and final Knoevenagel condensation with aryl aldehydes, or; b) Wolff-Kishner reduction of the isatins followed by condensation and finishing with the N-alkylation of the aldol products. In specific cases, a click reaction followed the N-alkylation of the aldol products to form the isatin …

Trace Metals In Sediments On The Continental Margin Of The Northwest Atlantic Ocean, Daniel L. Marsh

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Trace metals in the ocean are derived from natural and anthropogenic sources. Despite increased human impact on the marine environment and biological productivity of continental margins, trace metal studies in marine sediments have focused primarily on near-shore regions. I investigated 22 metals in sediments on the continental margin of the northwest Atlantic Ocean to calculate enrichment factors (EF) relative to upper continental crust and identify spatial variations with distance from shore and depth below the sediment-seawater interface. Metals were well correlated with Al, Fe, organic matter, or CaCO3. No clear trends in metal EFs with distance from shore were evident …

Distributed Sensor Fault Diagnosis For Automated Highway Systems, Hui Chen

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Fault diagnosis problems for large-scale nonlinear systems have attracted significant attentions from researchers in recent years. Most fault detection and isolation (FDI) methods have been proposed based on a centralized architecture. However, due to the complexity of the system, most of these centralized fault detection and diagnosis schemes are not able to delivery effective fault detection and isolation performance for a large-scale nonlinear system, which contains subsystems interacting with neighboring subsystems.

In this thesis, a distributed fault detection and isolation method is developed for the automated highway systems (AHS). For each subsystem of AHS, a distributed fault detection and isolation …

Computational Analysis Of Vortex Structures In Flapping Flight, Zongxian Liang

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Vortex structures and vortical formation in flapping flight are directly related to the force production. To analyze the connection between vortex structures and aerodynamic performance of flapping flight, we have developed highly efficient algorithms for large-scale flow simulations with moving and deforming bodies. To further understand the underlying mechanisms of force generation caused by the coherent structures of the vortex formation, a new analysis method has been developed to measure the influence of Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) modes on aerodynamic forces.

It is challenging to finish three-dimensional Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of insect flight in a limited amount of time. …

Accurate Splicing Of Hdac6 Requires Son, Vishnu Priya Chowdary Battini

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Pre-mRNA splicing requires proper splice site selection mediated by many factors including snRNPs and serine-arginine rich (SR) splicing factors. Son is the largest known SR splicing factor, and it has several putative functional domains including an RS domain, a glycine rich patch (G-patch) and double stranded RNA binding domain (DSRBD). One-third of Son's amino acid sequence consists of novel repetitive sequence motifs of unknown function (Sharma et al., 2010). Son is essential for organization of pre-mRNA processing factors in nuclear speckles and for cell cycle progression (Sharma et al., 2010; Sharma et al., 2011; Ahn et al 2011). Exon array …

A Methodology For Extracting Human Bodies From Still Images, Athanasios Tsitsoulis

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Monitoring and surveillance of humans is one of the most prominent applications of today and it is expected to be part of many future aspects of our life, for safety reasons, assisted living and many others. Many efforts have been made towards automatic and robust solutions, but the general problem is very challenging and remains still open. In this PhD dissertation we examine the problem from many perspectives. First, we study the performance of a hardware architecture designed for large-scale surveillance systems. Then, we focus on the general problem of human activity recognition, present an extensive survey of methodologies that …

How Ideas Grow: Critical Mass In The Linear Threshold Model, Hossein Alidaee

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

We study how ideas spread through a social network using the Linear Threshold Model. Each node i on the complete graph K_n is given a threshold Ɵ_i chosen uniformly at random from (0, 1]. This threshold indicates the fraction of the social network that must be active (or believe the idea) prior to node i becoming active. We start with an activated group of early adopters, called the seed set. Considering various scenarios, we use the probabilistic method to find lower bounds on size of a seed set which guarantees that all nodes become active with high …

The Phylogenetics Of Tachinidae (Insecta: Diptera) With An Emphasis On Subfamily Structure, Daniel J. Davis

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The parasitoid flies of the Tachinidae family are an important and diverse (>10,000 species) lineage of insects. However, tachinids are not well studied partially due to their confusing classification and taxonomy. DNA sequences were obtained from twenty tribal representatives of Tachinidae, along with eight outgroups in order to phylogenetically reconstruct the superfamilial, subfamilial and tribal relationships of Tachinidae. Seven gene regions of six genes (18S, 28S, COI, CAD, Ef1a, and TPI) were sequenced for each taxon (6214 bp total). Both maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods were used to infer phylogenies. The Sarcophagidae and Oestridae were usually reconstructed as monophyletic. …

Design And Fabrication Of An Eddy Current Brake Dynamometer For Efficiency Determination Of Electric Wheelchair Motors, Wesley Brin

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Electric wheelchairs have a considerable impact on improving the quality of life for the millions of disabled persons around the world. These modern pieces of technology offer freedom and mobility for disabled persons to interact with the world outside of their homes. The goal of this project is to assist in advancements of conventional electric wheelchairs. This includes replacing the heavy, bulky, and inefficient lead acid batteries and worm gear drive systems with lithium-ion batteries and wheel hub motors in order to decrease weight and size, and increase efficiency. This master thesis research is focused on designing, fabricating, and testing …

Anomalies In Sensor Network Deployments: Analysis, Modeling, And Detection, Giovani Rimon Abuaitah

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A sensor network serves as a vital source for collecting raw sensory data. Sensor data are later processed, analyzed, visualized, and reasoned over with the help of several decision making tools. A decision making process can be disastrously misled by a small portion of anomalous sensor readings. Therefore, there has been a vast demand for mechanisms that identify and then eliminate such anomalies in order to ensure the quality, integrity, and/or trustworthiness of the raw sensory data before they can even be interpreted.

Prior to identifying anomalies, it is essential to understand the various anomalous behaviors prevalent in a sensor …

The Synthesis Of Haplomyrtin Utilizing The Triisopropylsilyl Protecting Group, William S. Barrow

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The synthesis of the arylnaphthalene lignan haplomyrtin using vanillin as a starting material is synthesized via: 1) a bromination of vanillin, 4-hydroxy-5-methoxybenzaldehyde, to produce 6-bromovanillin 2) a hydroxyl protection step of 6-bromovanillin with triisopropylsilylchloride to produce 2-bromo-4-triisopropylsilyoxy-5-methoxybenzaldehyde 3) an aldehyde protection step through a cyclic acetal formation using ethylene glycol to produce 2-(2-bromo-4-triisopropylsilyloxy-5-methoxyphenyl)-1,3-dioxolane 4) a lithium for halogen exchange of the doubly protected 6-bromovanillin leads to neucleophilic coupling with piperonal producing 1,3-benzodioxol-5-yl-[5-triisopropylsilyloxy-2-(1,3-dioxolane-2-yl)-4-methoxyphenyl]methanol and 5) an acid catalyzed intramolecular cycloaddition /Diels Alder adduct with dimethyl acetylenedicarboxylate producing dimethyl 1-(1,3-benzodioxol-5-yl)-4-hydroxy-6-methoxy-7-triisopropylsilyloxynaphthalene-2,3-dicarboxylate.

Visualizing Confusion Matrices For Multidimensional Signal Detection Correlational Methods And Semantic Cluster Based Visualization In Virtual Environments, Yue Zhou

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General Recognition Theory (GRT) is a multidimensional signal detection theory framework for capturing sources of perceptual and decisional dependence. The primary type of data for GRT models is an identification-confusion matrix derived in a complete factorial identification task. This confusion matrix plots the responses of study participant for a given signal. The responses may reveal that participants were unable to recognize the signal properly. Such violations of any type of independence in the GRT framework result in response patterns that reflect some form of correlation in the GRT space. While an individual confusion matrix is rather small and relatively easy …

Iodo Containing Sulfone And Sulfonamide Based Poly(Arylene Ether)S, Fadwa G. Constandinidis

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In an ongoing project involving the synthesis of functionalized poly(arylene ether)s that carry pendent phenyl sulfonyl groups, the introduction of an iodo group was desired. The effects of fluorine position on the electrophilic iodination of the 2,4-, 2,6-, and 2,5- and 3,5-isomers of difluorodiphenylsulfone, DFDPS were studied. The relative reactivity, toward EAS, was probed via ¹³C NMR spectroscopy and verified experimentally by iodination with N-iodosuccinimide. The product mixtures and corresponding structures indicated that intermediate stability did not always correlate to reactivity. Model studies were also conducted on DFDPS isomers that successfully carry in iodo groups in a pendent …

Examination Of The African-American Father-Daughter Relationship: Application Of The Marschack Interaction Method, Amber N. Thornton

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Early research on the Black family implied an enormous lack of African-American father presence and involvement among African-American fathers. However, more current research negates those findings by highlighting the contributions African-American fathers make when parenting their children (Coley, 2003; Cooper, 2009; Mandara, Murray & Joyner, 2005). In spite of facing unique psychological and social challenges, such as disproportionate levels of poverty, and race related social barriers, such as the invisibility syndrome (Franklin & Boyd-Franklin, 2000), researchers who have studied the African-American father-daughter dyad have discovered that this relationship has many benefits for African-American girls, including cognitive and academic enhancements, reductions …

Barriers To Group Therapy For Latino College Students In The United States, Michelle C. Stoyell

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While group therapy appears to be gaining popularity at University Counseling Centers, scant research has been done on Latino students' group therapy participation. The present study examined the barriers that Latino college students face in considering whether to join group therapy. Participants (N=81) completed three measures. The first measure was a demographic questionnaire. The second measure was a modified version of the Barriers Scale, originally developed by Harris (2012), a 44-item survey in which participants were assessed in terms of: their willingness to consider group therapy, group therapy modality preferences, expectations of group therapy, expectations of group members, expectations of …

Cooperative Interactive Distributed Guidance On Mobile Devices, Gregory Burnett

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Mobiles device are quickly becoming an indispensable part of our society. Equipped with numerous communication capabilities, they are increasingly being examined as potential tools for civilian and military usage to aide in distributed remote collaboration for dynamic decision making and physical task completion. With an ever growing mobile workforce, the need for remote assistance in aiding field workers who are confronted with situations outside their expertise certainly increases. Enhanced capabilities in using mobile devices could significantly improve numerous components of a task's completion (i.e. accuracy, timing, etc.). This dissertation considers the design of mobile implementation of technology and communication capabilities …

Enhanced Resolution Of The Paleoenvironmental And Diagenetic Features Of The Silurian Brassfield Formation, Lisa Marie Oakley

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The Brassfield Formation is an early Silurian (Aeronian, Llandoverian) unit of limestone and dolostone with excellent preservation of early reef communities and a diverse invertebrate fauna. A well-preserved outcrop occurs in southwestern Ohio at the Oakes Quarry Park in Fairborn; it contains abundant corals and stromatoporoids that are co-dominant in reef and reef-affected settings. This research provided an enhanced perspective of the Brassfield Formation to better reconstruct its paleoenvironment and better understand its diagenetic features. The depositional and diagenetic features of the Brassfield are described and interpreted using histologic methods and light microscopy. Selected thin sections were treated with carbonate …

Co2/Ph Signaling Of Respiratory Control Neurons In The Bullfrog, Lithobates Catesbeianus: Development Of A Comparative Model, Joseph M. Santin

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The locus coeruleus (LC) in the brainstem senses alterations in CO₂/pH and influences ventilatory adjustments that restore blood gas values to starting levels in bullfrogs (Lithobates catesbeianus). We hypothesized that neurons of the bullfrog LC are sensitive to changes in CO₂/pH and that chemosensitive responses are intrinsic to individual neurons. In addition, we hypothesized putative respiratory control neurons of the bullfrog LC would be stimulated by hypercapnic acidosis within physiological ranges of PCO₂/pH. 84% of LC neurons depolarized and increased firing rates during exposure to hypercapnic acidosis (HA). A pH dose response …

Natural Language Document And Event Association Using Stochastic Petri Net Modeling, Michael Thomas Mills

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The purpose of this research is to design and implement a new methodology that captures the natural language understanding of events from English natural language text and model it using Stochastic Petri Nets. To establish a baseline of recent natural language processing (NLP) and understanding (NLU) research, two surveys are presented. One is a general survey in NLP and NLU methodologies for processing multi-documents. It summarizes and presents methodologies in terms of their features, capabilities, and maturity. The second survey focuses on graph-based methods for NL text processing and understanding and analyzes them in terms of their functional descriptions, capabilities …

The Synthesis Of Benzyloxy Substituted Dp-Ppvs, Ryan Oostendorp

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The alkyne 1-(benzyloxy)-4-(propargyloxy)benzene was reacted with 2,5-di(carboethoxy)3,4-diphenylcyclopentadienone to yield diethyl 5-((4-(benzyloxy)phenoxy)methyl)-2,3-diphenylterephthalate. The terephthalate was reduced with lithium aluminum hydride to produce 5-((4-(benzyloxy)phenoxy)methyl)-1,4-di(hydroxymethyl)-2,3-diphenylbenzene. The diol was reacted with thionyl chloride to yield the monomer 5-((4-(benzyloxy)phenoxy)methyl)-1,4-di(chloromethyl)-2,3-diphenylbenzene that has a pendent protected phenol function. The new compounds were characterized by melting point, IR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR spectroscopy and elemental analysis. Polymerization of the dichloro monomer via a Gilch polymerization yielded poly[(2,3-diphenyl-(5-((4-(benzyloxy)phenoxy)methyl)-1,4-phenylene) vinylene]. The polymer was characterized by IR, 1H NMR spectroscopy, TGA and DSC. The polymer was insoluble in most solvents but partially soluble in chlorinated solvents. The solid polymer fluoresced a …

Semsos : An Architecture For Query, Insertion, And Discovery For Semantic Sensor Networks, Joshua Kenneth Pschorr

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With sensors, storage, and bandwidth becoming ever cheaper, there has been a drive recently to make sensor data accessible on the Web. However, because of the vast number of sensors collecting data about our environment, finding relevant sensors on the Web and then interpreting their observations is a non-trivial challenge. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defines a web service specification known as the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) that is designed to standardize the way sensors and sensor data are discovered and accessed on the Web. Though this standard goes a long way in providing interoperability between sensor data producers and …

Two Fundamental Building Blocks To Provide Quick Reaction Capabilities For The Department Of Defense, Daniel Alan Uppenkamp

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The Department of Defense (DoD) has a need for long-term development efforts in conjunction with short-term development efforts. Ideally, Quick Reaction Capabilities (QRC) would be able to make use of the same processes that are used for Acquisition Programs (AP) with a few modifications to accommodate the accelerated schedule. Unfortunately, APs have a more fundamental problem with both the development process and the development framework. In August of 2007, the agile development process and modular, open source framework discussed in this thesis were two key factors that enabled the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to successfully deploy AngelFire in support …

An Accuracy Improvement Method For Cricket Indoor Location System, Anall Vijaykumar Gandhi

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The effective deployment of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) in indoor hostile environment demands high precision localization for navigation purposes. The cricket system, based on Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) approach, provides precise localization. It calculates TDoA between radio and ultrasonic signal to estimate distance between two cricket motes. The position, in the referenced coordinate system, is estimated by multilateration using estimated distances from multiple motes. Therefore, the position accuracy depends on the distance estimation which in turn depends on the TDoA calculation. Ultrasonic transducer, a component of cricket mote hardware, has highly directive radiation pattern which affects ultrasonic signal detection. …

Design And Improve Energy Efficiency And Functionalities Of Electrical Wheelchairs, Dewei Guan

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There are millions of people who have lost their abilities to walk and wheelchairs offer the ONLY opportunities for their interactions with people and environments outside their houses. These individuals are becoming more and more eager to adapt modern technologies on their wheelchairs to improve quality of social life and the life of freedom. However, most available electric wheelchairs, driven by traditional lead-acid batteries and gear motors, are heavy and bulky in design with low energy efficiency, limited travel radius, and scarce communication/navigation functionalities. This project is to design and prototype an electric wheelchair that is lighter, more flexible in …

Overview Of The Large-Scale Biosphere–Atmosphere Experiment In Amazonia Data Model Intercomparison Project (Lba-Dmip), Luis Gustavo Goncalves De Goncalves, Jordan Borak, Marcos Heil Costa, Scott R. Saleska, Ian Baker, Natalia Resprepo-Coupe, Michel Nobre Muza, Benjamin Poulter, Hans Verbeeck, Joshua B. Fisher, Altaf Arain, Phillip Arkin, Bruno P. Cestaro, Bradley Christoffersen, David Galbraith, Xiaodan Guan, Bart Van Den Hurk, Kazuhito Ichii, Hewlley Acioli Imbuzeiro, Atul Jain, Naomi Levine, Chaoqun Lu, Gonzalo Migues-Macho, Debora Roberti, Alok Sahoo, Koichi Sakaguchi, Kevin Shaefer, Mingjie Shi, James Shuttleworth, Hanqin Tian, Zong-Lian Yang, Xubin Zeng

United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration: Publications

A fundamental question connecting terrestrial ecology and global climate change is the sensitivity of key terrestrial biomes to climatic variability and change. The Amazon region is such a key biome: it contains unparalleled biological diversity, a globally significant store of organic carbon, and it is a potent engine driving global cycles of water and energy. The importance of understanding how land surface dynamics of the Amazon region respond to climatic variability and change is widely appreciated, but despite significant recent advances, large gaps in our understanding remain. Understanding of energy and carbon exchange between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere can …

Spurious Behavior Of Shock-Capturing Methods By The Fractional Step Approach: Problems Containing Stiff Source Terms And Discontinuities, Helen C. Yee, D. V. Kotov, Wei Wang, Chi-Wang Shu

United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration: Publications

The goal of this paper is to relate numerical dissipations that are inherited in high order shock-capturing schemes with the onset of wrong propagation speed of discontinuities. For pointwise evaluation of the source term, previous studies indicated that the phenomenon of wrong propagation speed of discontinuities is connected with the smearing of the discontinuity caused by the discretization of the advection term. The present study focuses only on solving the reactive system by the fractional step method using the Strang splitting. Studies shows that the degree of wrong propagation speed of discontinuities is highly dependent on the accuracy of the …

Corrigendum To ‘‘Spurious Behavior Of Shock-Capturing Methods By The Fractional Step Approach: Problems Containing Stiff Source Terms And Discontinuities’’ [J. Comput. Phys. 241 (2013) 266–291], Helen C. Yee, Dmitry V. Kotov, Wei Wang, Chi-Wang Shu

United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration: Publications

This corrigendum contains a correction to some of the figures in the article ‘‘Spurious behavior of shock-capturing methods by the fractional step approach: Problems containing stiff source terms and discontinuities’’ [J. Comput. Phys. 241 (2013) 266–291]. There was a computer coding error in the computer code that generates the results. The coding error consists of failing to update the temperature from the final solution of the RK4 convection step time evolution before the reaction step using the Strang splitting in Eq. (29). In addition, if N_r > 1, the error includes no update to the temperature for each sub-iteration on …

Adaptive Semantic Annotation Of Entity And Concept Mentions In Text, Pablo N. Mendes

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The recent years have seen an increase in interest for knowledge repositories that are useful across applications, in contrast to the creation of ad hoc or application-specific databases.

These knowledge repositories figure as a central provider of unambiguous identifiers and semantic relationships between entities. As such, these shared entity descriptions serve as a common vocabulary to exchange and organize information in different formats and for different purposes. Therefore, there has been remarkable interest in systems that are able to automatically tag textual documents with identifiers from shared knowledge repositories so that the content in those documents is described in a …