Digital Commons Network^™

In Another Day: The Historical And Cultural Relevance Of Gone With The Wind, Cody Rentz

Honors Theses

Although it was a massive success in its time and won a Pulitzer Prize, critics today tend to discard Gone with the Wind as a piece of low-quality, racist, historically inaccurate literature. However, the novel, through no intent of its author, parallels the Great Depression in many ways, a fact that likely contributed to its popularity. As such, the novel can be a useful tool in studying the culture of the 1930s. To study the cultural connections, I began by reading the novel, watching the film, and speculating as to the connections to Depression-era culture. I then researched the author, …

Dynamic Feature Extraction And User Classification Using Touchanalytics™, Clay Mcleod

Honors Theses

Security systems for modern computing devices suffer from a multitude of weaknesses that can render users helpless against an attack on their system. Various attempts at incorporating human characteristics into security systems have achieved varying levels of success in improving security. In this paper, we study the usefulness of TouchAnalytics™ - a second-level security system that attempts to authenticate a user based on touch-data gathered from an interaction with the device. Through the use of machine learning algorithms, we developed a system that is successful at au- thenticating users, achieving under 0.05% False Authentication Rate (FAR). We conclude that the …

Energy Drinks And Caffeine: The Science Behind The Billion- Dollar Industry, Eric Villarreal

Honors Theses

Ask any college student how he or she gets through long study sessions, all-nighters, and the always grueling finals week and he or she will most likely reference some caffeine-containing beverage as the antidote, with energy drinks becoming an ever increasing option. The effects, both physiological and psychological, of the ingredients in energy drinks (caffeine and, to a lesser degree, glucose) dictate their usefulness to consumers. A review of the available research literature from http://scholar.google.com using the following keywords: caffeine, energy drink, Red Bull, caffeinated beverage, caffeine drink, energy drink industry, energy drink company, and glucose yielded the references that …

Activating Actavis: Economic Issues In Applying The Rule Of Reason To Reverse Payment Settlements, Sumanth Addanki

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

Interaction Between A Low-Iron Diet And Early-Life Methylmercury Exposure In Daphnia Pulex, Sherri Hudson

All ETDs from UAB

Methylmercury (MeHg) is a known neurotoxicant and bioaccumulates in fish, with exposure to humans in utero being of highest concern. Iron deficiency (ID) accounts for approximately 50% of anemia cases. Anemia is estimated to affect 1.62 billion people worldwide, and is particularly problematic during pregnancy and early life. Previous studies have shown that ID exacerbates toxicity associated with exposure to metals, including lead, manganese, and cadmium. The overall purpose of this thesis research is to investigate the interaction between a low-iron (Fe) diet and early-life exposure to MeHg in Daphnia pulex. I hypothesized when D. pulex are fed a low-Fe …

Development Of A High-Throughput Self-Interaction Chromatography System, David Johnson

All ETDs from UAB

The first recombinant human protein drug, insulin expressed in e.coli cells, was approved by the FDA in 1982. Since then, protein therapeutics have become the fastest growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry and include immunoglobulin-g (IgG) directed cancer and immune disorder treatments. A major difficulty to bring protein drugs to market is the requirement that they be concentrated up to 150 mg/ml without aggregation for efficacy in a small injection volume. One way to improve protein drug solubility is to include additives that reduce protein-protein attraction and increase protein-protein repulsion thereby preventing protein molecules from coming together to form aggregates. …

An Investigation Of Organizational Health And Student Achievement In Urban Title I Elementary Schools In Alabama, Lora Ann Johnson-Perry

All ETDs from UAB

pattern similar to that of sea turtles. The results indicate that daily water treatments

Damping Enhancement Of A Pneumatic Inflatable Structure, Gabriel D. Judd

All ETDs from UAB

In vehicles with stiff or no suspension systems, the pneumatic tires play a greater role in vibration control. The challenge is to find an approach that enhances vibratory damping in the tires without increasing the power losses due to rolling resistance effects. The goal of this thesis is to experimentally prove a novel concept of active damping within the tire while maintaining the rolling resistance found in a typical pneumatic tire. The pneumatic structure containing two chambers connected by orifices can enhance vibration damping using the force induced when air flows through the orifices. Passive damping is produced when a …

A Low-Power Multichannel Telemetry System For High-Speed Wireless Neural Recordings, Yang-Guo Li

All ETDs from UAB

The advances in microelectronics and wireless communication are going to change our lifestyles and benefit our healthcare system in the foreseeable future. New conception named "Ubiquitous Healthcare" has been proposed. It envisions a continuous, real-time, remote monitoring on the health conditions of people through the wireless communication network. Traditional biosignal monitoring devices need wire-connections for the recording, which may cause skin rupture and body infection. The physical connections also limited the number of the integrated recording channels. A low-power implantable multichannel telemetry system which can be implanted in the body and transmit recordings wirelessly can solve the problem of the …

L∞-Extremal Mappings In Amle And Teichmüller Theory, Luca Capogna

Mathematics Sciences: Faculty Publications

These lecture focus on two vector-valued extremal problems which have a common feature in that the corresponding energy functionals involve L ∞ norm of an energy density rather than the more familiar L p norms. Specifically, we will address (a) the problem of extremal quasiconformal mappings and (b) the problem of absolutely minimizing Lipschitz extensions.

The Role Of Ih In 4-Aminopyridine Induced Epileptiform Activity, Steven Patrick Palladino

All ETDs from UAB

significantly different from sex ratios of control groups produced at constant incubation

Ghosts I : A New Faint Very Isolated Dwarf Galaxy At D = 12 ± 2 Mpc., Antonela Monachesi, Eric F. Bell, David J. Radburn-Smith, Roelof S. De Jong, Jeremy Bailin, Julianne J. Dalcanton, Benne W. Holwerda, H. Alyson Ford, David Streich, Marija Vlajic, Daniel B. Zucker

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

We report the discovery of a new faint dwarf galaxy, GHOSTS I, using HST/ACS data from one of our GHOSTS (Galaxy Halos, Outer disks, Substructure, Thick disk, and Star clusters) fields. Its detected individual stars populate an approximately 1 mag range of its luminosity function (LF). Using synthetic color–magnitude diagrams (CMDs) to compare with the galaxy’s CMD, we find that the colors and magnitudes of GHOSTS I’s individual stars are most consistent with being young helium-burning and asymptotic giant branch stars at a distance of ∼12±2 Mpc. Morphologically, GHOSTS I appears to be actively forming stars, so we tentatively classify …

Morphological Parameters Of A Spitzer Survey Of Stellar Structure In Galaxies., Benne W. Holwerda, J. C. Munoz-Mateos, S. Comeron, S. Meidt, K. Sheth, S. Laine, J. L. Hinz, M. W. Regan, A. Gil De Paz, K. Menendez-Delmestre, M. Seibert, T. Kim, T. Mizusawa, E. Laurikainen, H. Salo, J. Laine, D. A. Gadotti, D. Zaritsky, S. Erroz-Ferrer, L. C. Ho, J. H. Knapen, E. Athanassoula, A. Bosma, N. Pirzkal

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The morphology of galaxies can be quantified to some degree using a set of scale-invariant parameters. Concentration (C), asymmetry (A), smoothness (S), the Gini index (G), the relative contribution of the brightest pixels to the secondorder moment of the flux (M20), ellipticity (E), and the Gini index of the second-order moment (GM) have all been applied to morphologically classify galaxies at various wavelengths. Here, we present a catalog of these parameters for the Spitzer Survey of stellar structure in Galaxies, a volume-limited, near-infrared (NIR) imaging survey of nearby galaxies using the 3.6 and 4.5μm channels of the Infrared Array Camera …

Exploring Intrinsic Biomarkers For Optical Assessment Of Outer Retina, Rongwen Lu

All ETDs from UAB

The retina suffers pathological changes after attacked by eye diseases. The objective of my PhD dissertation is to explore intrinsic biomarkers for noninvasive assessment of retinal morphological structure and physiological function. Fundus autofluorescence (FAF), optical coherence tomography (OCT), etc. have provided indispensable information for eye disease detection. However, better understanding of the intrinsic biomarkers in FAF and OCT is desirable for quantitative interpretation of clinical outcomes. The first specific aim of the dissertation research was to characterize FAF signals across the whole retinal depth using two-photon excitation. FAF signals are usually attributable to fluorophores from the choroidal vessel and the …

The Inverse Volatility Problem For American Options, Ajay Mahato

All ETDs from UAB

The inverse problem of determining equity volatility from a knowledge of American option prices for a range of exercise prices and expirations is solved by minimization of a convex functional. This variational approach has distinct advantages over traditional least squares techniques in that, as the associated functional is convex, one typically has a unique global minimum, so that one is not concerned about the steepest descent minimization process "getting stuck" in spurious local minima. This is an enormous advantage numerically in difficult situations. We illustrate the method using examples drawn from recent market data.

Night Comes Early To The Valley, Caitlin Murphree Miller

All ETDs from UAB

Night Comes Early to the Valley is a collection of short stories about vulnerable, flawed people trying to discover the best way to live their lives. They are well-meaning mothers, fathers, children, and lovers, yet all struggle to balance the fulfillment of their personal responsibilities with the realization of their deepest individual desires. The collection highlights characters who are desperate to atone for their mistakes, build brighter futures, and live up to the expectations of their loved ones--only to realize, over time, that the most formidable judge they'll ever face is their own conscience.

The Classification Of V -Transverse Knots And Loose Legendrians, Patricia Cahn, Vladimir Chernov

Mathematics Sciences: Faculty Publications

We classify knots in a 3-manifold M that are transverse to a nowhere zero vector field V up to the corresponding isotopy relation. When V is the coorienting vector field of a contact structure, these knots are the same as pseudo-Legendrian knots, which were introduced by Benedetti and Petronio. We show that two loose Legendrian knots with the same overtwisted disk in their complement are Legendrian isotopic if and only if they are pseudoLegendrian isotopic.

V -transverse knots are naturally framed. We show that each framed isotopy class corresponds to infinitely many V -transverse isotopy classes whose elements are pairwise …

American Options And Semilinear Parabolic Partial Differential Equations In Weighted Sobolev Spaces., Terrence K. Muthoka

All ETDs from UAB

To value an American option as a function of time t and price of the underlying asset S is currently a major research problem in both Financial Markets and for academic purposes. Options and more general financial derivatives (also known as contingent claims) are now an important tool in risk management. One of the earliest models used in pricing derivatives is the Black-Scholes model, for which the movement in the price of the underlying asset on which the claim is based is modeled by geometric Brownian motion. Other models used for theoretical and numerical analysis of American options include the …

Quantum Computation Approach To Information Theoretic Modeling And Analysis Of Systems, Luai Najim

All ETDs from UAB

The modeling of systems has been addressed in the physical sciences from the perspective of Energy and matter. The 3rd original idea of Communication as a means of modeling systems has been established and applied. In this study, we apply the 3rd original idea of communication to systems on a quantum level. By marrying Shannon's noisy communication channel to Feynman QED and Quantum Computing, we realize a visual model for the representation of the entropy of a noisy communication channel on a quantum scale. We also use that visual representation concept to define a geometric view into the superposition of …

Valuation In Light Of Uncertainty: How Stock Option Pricing Models Can Inform More Accurate Valuation Discounts For Built-In Gains, Rebecca N. Morrow

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

4% Absent = 100% Disaster: Why The Math Doesn't Add Up On Fixed Attendance Leave Policies Under The Fmla, Laraclay Parker

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Subprime Scriveners, Milan Markovic

Kentucky Law Journal

Although mortgage-backed securities ("MBS") and other financial products that nearly caused the collapse of the global financial system could not have been issued without attorneys, the legal profession's role in the financial crisis has received relatively little scrutiny.

This Article focuses on lawyers' preparation of MBS offering documents that misrepresented the lending practices of mortgage loan originators. While attorneys may not have known that many MBS would become toxic, they lacked incentives to inquire into the shoddy lending practices of prominent originators, such as Washington Mutual Bank ('WaMu"), when they and their clients were reaping considerable profits from MBS offerings. …

Effects Of Coteaching Instruction Between A Speech Pathologist And First Grade Teachers, Chrisonia Busch

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The effects of coteaching instruction used by speech language pathologists (SLP) and 1st grade teachers on students' early literacy skills have not been widely examined in current literature. This lack of research may hinder the efforts of SLPs to provide support services for students with and without disabilities who struggle with early literacy skills. Guided by the ecological systems theory, this quasi-experimental study examined the impact of coteaching instruction on students' literacy skills by comparing scores of 2 groups, experimental group who received coteaching and control group who did not receive coteaching instruction. The scores were measured by the final …

Teachers' Perceptions Of The Use Of Read 180 With Secondary Remedial Reading Students, Melanie Mclaughlin Cleveland

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Read 180 is a research-based reading intervention program. One local district implemented the program to improve student performance on the state assessment, and after a year of implementation, nearly half of the students in the district studied still did not make adequate progress in reading. The purpose of this study was to explore teachers' perceptions of and experiences with the use of Read 180 in secondary reading classrooms. Guided by Carroll's framework on the critical aspects of implementation, the study examined teachers' perceptions of (a) availability of resources necessary to adhere to the program's design, (b) ample class time to …

Adolescent And Community Adult Perceptions Of Adolescent Tobacco Use, Susan M. Franko

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In 1964, the Surgeon General issued the first report that linked smoking cigarettes as a direct cause of emphysema, heart disease, and lung cancer. Despite this landmark publication, the primary cause of preventable deaths each year in the United States continues to be related to the use of tobacco. Regardless of decades of health education and resources available to inform society that the use of tobacco products can have deleterious effects on health, adolescents continue to experiment with them. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the influences of adolescent tobacco use. Based on the …

Collaborative And Creative Thinking Skill Development Through The Design Of Wearable Technologies, Laurie E. Korte

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Skills inherent in the creative thinking process such as reflecting and collaborating are needed for success in many careers. However, a focus on standardized testing in K-12 schools in the United States has resulted in the restructuring, reduction, and in some cases, elimination of arts in the curriculum to the detriment of students' creative thinking process. The purpose of this study was to discover whether creative thinking and collaborative skills were positive unintended consequences of a curriculum that includes the design of wearable technologies. Jonassen's modeling using Mindtools for conceptual change and Rosen's culture of collaboration provided the conceptual framework. …

High School Student Athletes And Nonathletes' Disciplinary Referrals And Grade Point Averages, Jack Willard Calhoun

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

High School Student Athletes and Nonathletes'

Disciplinary Referrals and Grade Point Averages

by

Jack Calhoun

MEd, Georgia Southwestern State University, 1998

BS, Georgia Southwestern State University, 1997

Doctoral Study Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Education

Walden University

December 2014

This quantitative study investigated how athletic participation in public high schools influenced students' academic achievement and positive social behavior. Disciplinary referrals are on the rise in American schools and are a cause of concern for teachers, administrators, parents, and community members. School personnel currently implement programs designed to curb discipline problems in the …

Combining Appreciative Inquiry And Emotional Intelligence To Understand And Improve The Professional Development Of K-12 Teachers, Jamie Elizabeth Dewitt

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Creating meaningful and effective professional development (PD) programs for K-12 teachers is an ongoing challenge. The problem is exacerbated when PD models are implemented without fully aligning PD resources and plans with the training needs of teachers and the organization. The guiding question sought to understand the experiences of teachers at an online charter school about the implementation of PD as a means for improving student outcomes. The purpose of the study was to find ways to enhance PD in order to improve student outcomes at the school. The conceptual framework for this study is interwoven through the constructs of …

The Burden Of Avian Influenza Viruses In Community Ponds In California, Zin Htway

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Emerging influenza viruses continue to challenge public health. The problem is public health science professionals have been battling emerging human influenza diseases with tactile and reactionary methods because there is a lack of knowledge and data at the human-animal interface. This research was a baseline study of the proportion of influenza A virus (IAV) in urban and rural communities in California. The population was artificial recirculating water ponds in the geographic locations of rural and urban Californian communities. Surface water samples [N = 182] were collected from artificial recirculating ponds in California. Positivity for IAV was verified by real time …

Worked Examples In Video Lessons To Reduce Cognitive Load, Kiera Llord-Ratcliffe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Informed parent advocates are essential to planning the educational outcomes of their children with special needs in the K through 12 public school system. However, inappropriate instructional techniques used in advocacy training may reduce trainees' learning outcomes by adding complexity and increasing cognitive load. This study examined whether using worked examples to break down complex problems into component parts to build long term schema could lower cognitive load and thus improve learning outcomes for parent advocacy trainees. Based on cognitive load theory, this 2 x 3 factorial design study examined the efficacy of noninteractive video lessons for parent trainees using …