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2014

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Building Sanity: The Rise And Fall Of Architectural Treatment At The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, Kimberly Jean Campbell Dec 2014

Building Sanity: The Rise And Fall Of Architectural Treatment At The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, Kimberly Jean Campbell

Theses and Dissertations

Although many historians have acknowledged the importance of architecture in the treatment of the mentally ill during the nineteenth century, no historian has ever examined the rise and fall of the importance of architecture to the treatment of patients at the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum. By the late eighteenth century, physicians and laymen alike accepted the ideology of environmental determinism – that one’s environment exercised a direct influence over his or her behavior. In other words, mental illness was both caused and cured by the environment; thus, architecture played a key role in the treatment of mental illness. The South …

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When Do Political Ideologies Affect Brand Extension Evaluation? The Role Of Analytic Versus Holistic Mindsets, Cristobal Barra Dec 2014

When Do Political Ideologies Affect Brand Extension Evaluation? The Role Of Analytic Versus Holistic Mindsets, Cristobal Barra

Theses and Dissertations

Political ideologies are becoming an important focus of attention in the marketing literature. This research examines the impact of political ideologies on consumers’ evaluation of brand extensions. In a series of six studies, this work shows how, and under what conditions, liberals evaluate brand extensions differently than conservatives. Because liberals are more open to new experiences, and tend to seek novelty, while conservatives show stronger preferences for order, structure, and conventional things, liberals are expected to react more favorably to new stimuli, as in the case of dissimilar brand extensions. However, the effects of political ideologies are dependent on some …

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An Analysis Of The Cultural Invariance Of A Visual-Motor Integration Measure, Emma Kate C. Wright Dec 2014

An Analysis Of The Cultural Invariance Of A Visual-Motor Integration Measure, Emma Kate C. Wright

Theses and Dissertations

As diverse populations within schools increase, the need for culturally-sensitive assessment is essential; however, test of ability vary in their degree of influence from culture. No test is “culture free,” but the low-linguistic demands on test of visual-motor integration (VMI) make them appropriate for use with diverse populations. Variation in VMI test performance due to cultural factors has negative implications for test interpretation and use with diverse populations because of VMI’s significant association with school readiness, academic achievement, social-emotional functioning, and neuropsychological assessment. The current study explored the cultural invariance of the Bender Motor Gestalt Test, Second Edition (BG-II), a …

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The Role Of The Learning Community In The Professional Development Of Literacy Teachers, Abbey Spoonmore Duggins Dec 2014

The Role Of The Learning Community In The Professional Development Of Literacy Teachers, Abbey Spoonmore Duggins

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative case study explored a learning community in action. The purpose of this study was to investigate the professional conversations that teachers in a learning community had and the impact of those conversations on the practices and beliefs of the individual teachers in the community. Specifically, the study sought to discover how and why facets of professional learning transferred (or did not transfer) into classroom practice. The researcher spent five months with a learning community comprised of six middle school literacy teachers and attended their learning community meetings, visited their classrooms, and videotaped them teaching. Each classroom visit was …

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Application Of Various Adsorbents To Remove Micro-Pollutants In Aquatic System, Chanil Jung Dec 2014

Application Of Various Adsorbents To Remove Micro-Pollutants In Aquatic System, Chanil Jung

Theses and Dissertations

Untreated or insufficiently treated pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) as well as heavy metals have influenced the ecosystem and their exposures in the water system have threatened human health; causing cancers and adverse health effect to immune system. While various water treatment techniques have been applied to solve this problem, adsorption has been considered as one of the most efficient and manageable water purification techniques. Advanced analysis methods for aqueous contaminants have improved comprehension, allowing proficiency about the fate of trace leveled emerging contaminants, thus allowed to reveal the adsorption mechanisms of each pollutant. This dissertation focuses on the …

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Relationships Between Prior Experiences, Current Teaching Contexts, And Novice Teachers' Use Of Concrete Representation For Mathematics Instruction, Elizabeth Lee Johnson Dec 2014

Relationships Between Prior Experiences, Current Teaching Contexts, And Novice Teachers' Use Of Concrete Representation For Mathematics Instruction, Elizabeth Lee Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

This case study documents the perceived influences on three novice elementary teachers’ use of concrete representations for teaching mathematics. In order to develop mathematical proficiency, students need access to a variety of representations (i.e. pictures, words, symbols, concrete materials, and real world contexts) to make sense of mathematical ideas. Three sources of data were collected: video-recorded lessons, interviews, and a focus group. Analyses indicated that although concrete representations were accessible to all three teachers, they were least used among the available representations. Verbal expression was most prominent, followed closely by abstract written symbols. Technology, which was not one of the …

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Toward The Combinatorial Development Of Hydrophobic-Tagged Antifolate-Directed Degradation Of Human Thymidylate Synthase, Daniel J. Menasco Dec 2014

Toward The Combinatorial Development Of Hydrophobic-Tagged Antifolate-Directed Degradation Of Human Thymidylate Synthase, Daniel J. Menasco

Theses and Dissertations

Direct post-translational control over a protein of interest (POI) can be exploited by manipulating the cells protein quality-control systems responsible for either intracellular turnover through ubiquitination (POI half-life) or repairing and degrading misfolded proteins.1 In an effort to target and degrade a high value POI we selected the enzyme human thymidylate synthase (TS) for post-translational degradation through ligand-directed ubiquitination and hydrophobic tagging. Thymidylate synthase catalyzes the reductive methylation of 2’-deoxyuridine monophosphate (dUMP) to 2’-deoxythymidine monophosphate (dTMP). As the de novo source of dTMP the regulation of intracellular TS is strictly controlled by ubiquitinindependent proteasomal degradation mediated by an internal TS-degron …

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Defining And Supporting Organizational Readiness In The Interactive Systems Framework For Dissemination And Implementaion, Jonathan Peter Scaccia Dec 2014

Defining And Supporting Organizational Readiness In The Interactive Systems Framework For Dissemination And Implementaion, Jonathan Peter Scaccia

Theses and Dissertations

Introduction. In the implementation literature, organizational readiness is associated with an increased likelihood of achieving innovation outcomes. Organizational readiness consists of organizational capacity (general and innovation-specific) and organization motivation. Organizations who wish to get results from their innovations have an interest in making sure that certain factors and subcomponents are in place. However, having awareness that certain capacities and factors that influence motivation are linked to improved innovation outcomes does not necessarily help organizations to get “more ready.” There is a need for organizations to know if and how they can effectively put these factors and subcomponents into place. This …

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Universal Two-Electron Correlation Operator On Excited States, Bryan Thomas Nichols Dec 2014

Universal Two-Electron Correlation Operator On Excited States, Bryan Thomas Nichols

Theses and Dissertations

Excited states of chemical systems are extremely important in understanding spectra, chemical phenomena, as well as how a particular compound behaves in reactions. Computationally, excited states are normally very expensive to calculate. The difficulty in calculating these states with wavefunction based methods can be mainly attributed to the calculation of large multi-determinant wavefunctions. One reason to use a complicated multi-determinant wavefunction is to include some of the effects of correlation energy. The quantity of correlation energy can most simply be defined as the reduction in energy caused by any two or more electrons trying to avoid each other. The most …

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Advanced Digital Signal Processing Based Redefined Power Quality Indices, And Their Applications To Wind Power, Md Moinul Islam Dec 2014

Advanced Digital Signal Processing Based Redefined Power Quality Indices, And Their Applications To Wind Power, Md Moinul Islam

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a time-frequency distribution (TFD) based new method to redefine the power quality (PQ) indices for the assessment of PQ disturbances typically present in electric power systems. The redefined PQ indices are applied to various types of synthetic and real-world PQ disturbances in order to verify the efficacy and applicability of the proposed method. The case studies show that the proposed method provides actual results with respect to the existing TFD-based transient PQ indices, and provides much more accurate results than the traditional fast Fourier transform (FFT) based PQ indices under stationary and nonstationary PQ disturbances. In addition, …

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High-Performance Meta-Genomic Gene Identification, Ibrahim Savran Dec 2014

High-Performance Meta-Genomic Gene Identification, Ibrahim Savran

Theses and Dissertations

Computational Genomics, or Computational Genetics, refers to the use of computational and statistical analysis for understanding the structure and the function of genetic material in organisms. The primary focus of research in computational genomics in the past three decades has been the understanding of genomes and their functional elements by analyzing biological sequence data. The high demand for low-cost sequencing has driven the development of highthroughput sequencing technologies, next-generation sequencing (NGS), that parallelize the sequencing process, producing thousands or millions of sequences concurrently. Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two …

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The Role Of Lis1 In Adult Mammalian System, Xu Gao Dec 2014

The Role Of Lis1 In Adult Mammalian System, Xu Gao

Theses and Dissertations

Lis1 haploinsufficiency in humans results in a “smooth brain” phenotype called lissencephaly, and also causes severe cognitive and motor impairments and epilepsy. Seizure severity and frequency typically worsens with time; patients often die within the first decade due to seizure-induced aspiration and pneumonia. Various mouse models have been used to examine the role of Lis1 during brain development, and it is clear that Lis1 regulates a microtubule motor, cytoplasmic dynein. Intriguingly, Lis1 expression remains high in adult brains indicating that it plays a role in mature systems. Indeed, our group found that Lis1 and several related proteins regulate dynein-dependent axon …

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Leadership Perspectives On International Education For Public School Students In South Carolina: Two Case Studies, Frederick Eugene Brown Dec 2014

Leadership Perspectives On International Education For Public School Students In South Carolina: Two Case Studies, Frederick Eugene Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores how two rural public school districts in South Carolina conceptualize and implement an international education, according to the perspectives of administrators and teachers. This comparative case study of two public school districts spans the districts’ elementary, middle, high and career center schools and seeks to understand how the presence of a major multinational corporation influences school internationalization. The data on their perspectives on internationalization were drawn from interviews. I interviewed the school principal and teachers involved in internationalizing the curriculum, policy and practice in each of the ten schools. In addition to school level personnel, I interviewed …

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Exploring The Association Between Depression And Obesity Among Alzheimer's Patients, Stephanie Clugstone Dec 2014

Exploring The Association Between Depression And Obesity Among Alzheimer's Patients, Stephanie Clugstone

Theses and Dissertations

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurological disorder that affects elderly individuals, and is becoming an increasing concern among the aging population of the world. Due to the projected increase in incidence of AD, modifiable risk factors such as depression and obesity should be evaluated, as prevention is the only current option. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of obesity and depression among AD patients, and to evaluate the association between depression and obesity. Patients were chosen from a subset of the South Carolina Alzheimer’s disease registry, which included information about weight status and depression, as well as several other …

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Low Reynolds Number Turbulence: Mechanisms And Applications, Wei Zhao Dec 2014

Low Reynolds Number Turbulence: Mechanisms And Applications, Wei Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

Turbulence, as one of "the most important unsolved classical problem in physics" (R. Feynman, 1932), has been investigated for more than 130 years. Conventionally, turbulence is believed to be a phenomenon of high Reynolds numbers (Re). However, we find that turbulence can also be achieved at low Re by proper external forcing, either in macroflows or in microflows. In macroflows, the characteristics of high Re turbulence can be achieved in confined flows, when the bulk flow Re is around 400, by external forcing at its optimal frequency (Wang 2003; Wang 2006). Interestingly, the optimal narrow band of frequency is fixed …

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Surface Modification Of Nanoplatelets In Polymer Nanocomposites, Shailesh K. Shori Dec 2014

Surface Modification Of Nanoplatelets In Polymer Nanocomposites, Shailesh K. Shori

Theses and Dissertations

In polymer nanocomposites (PNCs), it is very important that the nanofiller (typically an inorganic) is well-dispersed in an organic polymer matrix. Optimal compatibility results in end-use products such as packaging materials with enhanced properties. In practice, however, this is challenging to achieve because “ideal” dispersions require the complete uniform separation, termed exfoliation, of the nanofiller within the matrix. As a result, different nanofillers including calcium niobate (CN) and montmorillonite (MMT) are first studied for their ability to exfoliate in aqueous suspensions by measuring the organic cation uptake. The cation exchange capacity, or CEC, determined that CN needs further work before …

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Applications Of Advanced Imaging Methods: Macro-Scale Studies Of Woven Composites And Micro-Scale Measurements On Heated Ic Packages, Siming Guo Dec 2014

Applications Of Advanced Imaging Methods: Macro-Scale Studies Of Woven Composites And Micro-Scale Measurements On Heated Ic Packages, Siming Guo

Theses and Dissertations

As a representative advanced imaging technique, the digital image correlation (DIC) method has been well established and widely used for deformation measurements in experimental mechanics. This methodology, both 2D and 3D, provides qualitative and quantitative information regarding the specimen’s non-uniform deformation response. Its full-field capabilities and non-contacting approach are especially advantageous when applied to heterogeneous material systems such as fiber-reinforced composites and integrated chip (IC) packages. To increase understanding of damage evolution in advanced composite material systems, a series of large deflection bending-compression experiments and model predictions have been performed for a woven glass-epoxy composite material system. Stereo digital image …

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Diversity, Genetics, And Health Benefits Of Sorghum Grain, Davina Rhodes Dec 2014

Diversity, Genetics, And Health Benefits Of Sorghum Grain, Davina Rhodes

Theses and Dissertations

Staple cereal crops provide the majority of nutrients to the world's population, and thus, can significantly impact human nutrition and health. Phenotypic and genetic diversity within a crop can be useful for biofortification and crop improvement, but quantitative phenotyping is needed to identify varieties with high or low concentrations of a nutrient of interest, and to identify alleles responsible for quantitative trait variation of the nutrient. Sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] is a diverse and widely adapted cereal crop that provides food for more than 500 million people in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, and is becoming increasingly popular in specialty …

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Practical Concurrency Support For Web Service Transactions, Emad Alsuwat Dec 2014

Practical Concurrency Support For Web Service Transactions, Emad Alsuwat

Theses and Dissertations

Traditional database concurrency control methods use locking, timestampordering, and optimistic-ordering to achieve DB consistency. However, these approaches are not suitable for long-running Web Service Compositions (WSCs) due to associated performance degradation. Our hypothesis asserts that, using transactional semantic and ordering information, the execution time of a WSC can be reduced, thus allowing the use of traditional database concurrency control methods while avoiding unacceptable performance degradation. Our solution is based on the following approaches: § We model a WSC as WS-BPEL specification, i.e., a partial order of WS transactions. § We allow some of the WS transactions in the WSC to …

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Understanding The Evolutionary History Of Biochemical Innovation, Madeline Opal St. Julien Dec 2014

Understanding The Evolutionary History Of Biochemical Innovation, Madeline Opal St. Julien

Theses and Dissertations

The serine protease (SP) gene family is an ecologically important gene family because of observed involvement in innate immunity, digestive processes, and embryological development of arthropods. In the past decade, all genes of the serine protease family have been classified in a number of arthropods, with the exception of crustacean. Possible evolutionary mechanisms have been observed based off of varying selectional pressures acting on recent SP expansions in respect to varying diets. Daphnia is the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced, and their genomes were analyzed in this study to elucidate the expansion and divergence of the SP gene …

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Thermal Ecology And Physiology Of An Intertidal Predator-Prey System: Pisaster Ochraceus And Mytilus Californianus, Cristian J. Monaco Dec 2014

Thermal Ecology And Physiology Of An Intertidal Predator-Prey System: Pisaster Ochraceus And Mytilus Californianus, Cristian J. Monaco

Theses and Dissertations

Untangling natural systems’ complexity requires understanding the mechanisms responsible for organisms’ responses to environmental change. Recently, significant advances have been made by recognizing the relevance of direct and indirect effects, which take place when multiple biotic and abiotic factors influence each other. I examined potential direct effects of environmental variables on a predator-prey interaction, as well as potential indirect effects of these variables on the interaction itself. I placed emphasis on behavioral and physiological adaptations, which would potentially contribute/modify these effects. My study system was comprised of a rocky intertidal keystone predator, the sea star Pisaster ochraceus, and its main …

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Revising For Genre: Mary Robinson's Poetry From Newspaper Verse To Lyrical Tales, Shelley Aj Jones Dec 2014

Revising For Genre: Mary Robinson's Poetry From Newspaper Verse To Lyrical Tales, Shelley Aj Jones

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, not as the culminating point to which her writing inevitably led, as is frequently imagined in accounts of her life and work, but, instead, as the product of an intricate process of revision that highlights her investment in genre. Versions of many of the poems that Robinson included in Lyrical Tales originally were published in newspapers and periodicals. Rather than seeing the changes as a move toward a best or most mature or inspired version, I argue that Robinson revised to meet the requirements of her new genre, the lyrical tale. I …

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Semiparametric Regression Analysis Of Bivariate Interval-Censored Data, Naichen Wang Dec 2014

Semiparametric Regression Analysis Of Bivariate Interval-Censored Data, Naichen Wang

Theses and Dissertations

Survival analysis is a long-lasting and popular research area and has numerous applications in all fields such as social science, engineering, economics, industry, and public health. Interval-censored data are a special type of survival data, in which the survival time of interest is never exactly observed but is known to fall within some observed interval. Interval-censored data arise commonly in real-life studies, in which subjects are examined at periodical or irregular follow-up visits. In this dissertation, we develop efficient statistical approaches for regression analysis of bivariate intervalcensored data, in which the two survival times of interest are correlated and both …

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Automated Scratchpad Mapping And Allocation For Embedded Processors, Yang Gao Dec 2014

Automated Scratchpad Mapping And Allocation For Embedded Processors, Yang Gao

Theses and Dissertations

Embedded system-on-chip processors such as the Texas Instruments C66 DSP and the IBM Cell provide the programmer with a software controlled on-chip memory to supplement a traditional but simple two-level cache. By decomposing data sets and their corresponding workload into small subsets that fit within this on-chip memory, the processor can potentially achieve equivalent or better performance, power efficiency, and area efficiency than with its sophisticated cache. However, program controlled on chip memory requires a shift in the responsibility for management and allocation from the hardware to the programmer. Specifically, this requires the explicit mapping of program arrays to specific …

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Intensive Dual Enrollment: Early Credits Or Empty Promises, Brian J. Modarelli Dec 2014

Intensive Dual Enrollment: Early Credits Or Empty Promises, Brian J. Modarelli

Theses and Dissertations

American high school students are afforded a wide array of opportunities to earn college credits. Industrious secondary students are enrolling in early credit options in steadily growing numbers, and are expecting the benefit of entering the university of their choice with several college credits already completed. However, an unmistakable lack of standardization and predictability exists regarding the transferability of college credits earned by secondary students. The purpose of this research is to determine the relationship between the selectivity level of a university and that university’s willingness to accept either an associate degree or the transfer credits from an early credit …

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Theoretical Investigation Of The Catalytic, Liquid-Phase Hydrodeoxygenation Of Organic Acids And Esters, Sina Behtash Dec 2014

Theoretical Investigation Of The Catalytic, Liquid-Phase Hydrodeoxygenation Of Organic Acids And Esters, Sina Behtash

Theses and Dissertations

With worldwide fossil fuel resources dwindling and greenhouse gas emissions rising, it is urgent to find renewable liquid fuel alternatives from e.g. biomass to meet the world’s growing energy demand. Lipid feedstocks and pyrolysis oils from woody biomass can be utilized for the production of second-generation biofuels via a catalytic hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) process. The conversion of fatty acids and esters plays an important role in the activity and selectivity of these processes. Understanding the HDO reaction mechanism of organic acids and esters on metal surfaces is a prerequisite for the rational design of new HDO catalysts specifically designed for upgrading …

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Benefits Of Video Games In Multidisciplinary Scientific Research, Jeremiah Jeffrey Shepherd Dec 2014

Benefits Of Video Games In Multidisciplinary Scientific Research, Jeremiah Jeffrey Shepherd

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, computer-based games have been shown to be effective both as a tool for conducting research in a variety of domains and for research on games itself. In this work, we show that implementing games that have a basis in theory and that are combined with the most recent gaming practices result in effective research tools. We demonstrate this via game implementations for three domains. The first implementation is based on new theories in speech pedagogy, and demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. The second implementation shows that using a game that simulates therapeutic speech practices can aid …

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Understanding Geo-Social Network Patterns: Computation, Visualization, And Usability, Caglar Koylu Dec 2014

Understanding Geo-Social Network Patterns: Computation, Visualization, And Usability, Caglar Koylu

Theses and Dissertations

Geo-social networks are formed by flows of physical entities (e.g., humans, vehicles, sensors, animals), and communication (e.g., information, ideas, innovation) that connect places to places and individuals to individuals. Several major problems remain to be addressed for understanding the complex patterns in geo-social networks. This dissertation makes the following contributions to the theory and methodologies that aim at understanding complex geo-social data by integrating methods of computation, visualization and usability evaluation. Chapter 2 introduces a novel network-based smoothing approach that addresses the size-difference and small area problem in calculating and mapping locational (graph) measures in spatial interaction networks. The new …

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Pattern Extraction From Spatial Data - Statistical And Modeling Approches, Hu Wang Dec 2014

Pattern Extraction From Spatial Data - Statistical And Modeling Approches, Hu Wang

Theses and Dissertations

Exploratory and statistical spatial data analyses are commonly used in a wide range of research fields, such as epidemiology, disease surveillance and crime analysis. Spatial epidemiology, for example, needs to detect significant spatial clusters of disease incidents to help epidemiologists identify environmental factors and spreading patterns associated with certain diseases. Existing spatial analysis approaches mostly focus on the analysis of spatial lattice data, i.e., observations organized by locations such as county or census tract. With the wide spread of location-aware technologies such as GPS and smart phones, spatial interaction data have become increasingly available, e.g., human daily mobility, traveling and …

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Neodymium Isotopic Signature Of The Deep Western Boundary Current And The Distribution Of Neodymium Isotopes And Concentrations Across Line W, Brian Daniel Duggan Dec 2014

Neodymium Isotopic Signature Of The Deep Western Boundary Current And The Distribution Of Neodymium Isotopes And Concentrations Across Line W, Brian Daniel Duggan

Theses and Dissertations

The capacity of the neodymium (Nd) 143Nd/144Nd ratio to trace modern ocean circulation accurately allows for the assumption that the ratio can also accurately trace paleo ocean circulation. Therefore, a complete understanding of Nd cycling and its effect on the isotopic composition in the oceans is vital. Traditionally, Nd isotopic composition (Nd IC) is considered a conservative property in the open ocean, while coastal and margin environments tend to be dictated by nonconservative exchange processes. However, Nd concentrations ([Nd]) in the open ocean typically display a nutrient like profile, increasing with depth. Such a discrepancy between Nd IC and [Nd] …

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