Digital Commons Network^™

Teacher Internship Report - Central High School, June Elizabeth Ann Bettencourt Mrs

Agricultural Education: Graduate Internship Reports

This internship report includes validation documents required in meeting the quality criteria for secondary-level programs of instruction in agriculture at Central High School located in Fresno, California. The documents are concurrently used for the Agriculture Incentive Grant review process at Central High School, conducted by representatives of the California Department of Education. The internship included the development of a comprehensive program plan for Central High School. The plan includes information to receive state/local funding, an outline of the goals and objectives of the program, along with an overview of Central High School, the agriculture program and community. The internship also …

Isis: The Terrorist Group That Would Be A State, Michael W.S. Ryan

CIWAG Case Studies

(IWS/02 - Irregular Warfare Studies, book 2)

This case study presents a historical net assessment of ISIS, and its strengths and weaknesses at its zenith. Its military and policy recommendations for degrading ISIS are useful conclusions for confronting similar ideological territorial based groups in the future. This case study represents historical research current as of August 2015.

Stem Stories, December 2015, #1, Daniel Vorwerk

STEM Stories

Department Spotlight - Department of Physics

News From Hope College, Volume 47.2: December, 2015, Hope College

News from Hope College

No abstract provided.

Business Outlook, Vol. 31, No. 4, December 2015

Business Outlook for West Michigan

No abstract provided.

Product Liability, Franklin P. Brannan Jr., P. Michael Freed, Jake C. Evans

Mercer Law Review

This Article surveys developments in Georgia product liability law between June 1, 2013 and May 31, 2015. It covers noteworthy cases decided during this period by the Georgia Court of Appeals, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and the United States district courts located in Georgia.

Insurance, Bradley S. Wolff, Stephen Schatz, Maren R. Cave

Mercer Law Review

Courts continue to address the unique issues that arise with respect to uninsured motorist (UM) coverage, often finding that coverage exists. In a case of first impression, the Georgia Supreme Court held that an insured may recover UM benefits from a policy, despite the partial sovereign immunity of the tortfeasor. An insured may be entitled to UM benefits after settling with the tortfeasor's liability carrier for the full policy limits, even though a limited liability release allocates the majority of the settlement amount to punitive damages. Further, courts continue to strictly adhere to the "case or controversy" requirement in order …

Reactions Of The Transgender Community Regarding Media Representation, Chani Wellborn

Communication Theses - Archive

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues have increasingly been focused on in society and also in communication media research. However, academic studies focusing on transgender reactions to recent representation developments of their community in the media world have not been done. The researcher conducted one-on-one interviews with those identifying as male to female (MtF) transgender in order to study their reactions to media coverage of the transgender community. Cultural studies and communication theories, as well as transgender and trans-identity theories provided a theoretical structure and basis for developing the study and interview questions. Qualitative methodology using an inductive grounded …

Detecting Real-Time Check-Worthy Factual Claims In Tweets Related To U.S. Politics, Fatma Dogan

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

In increasing democracy and improving political discourse, political fact-checking has come to be a necessity. While politicians make claims about facts all the time, journalists and fact-checkers oftentimes reveal them as false, exaggerated, or misleading. Use of technology and social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter has rapidly increased the spread of misinformation. Thus, human fact-checkers face difficulty in keeping up with a massive amount of claims, and falsehoods frequently outpace truths. All U.S. politicians have successively adopted Twitter, and they make use of Twitter for a wide variety of purposes, a great example being making claims to enhance …

Lung Cancer Subtype Classification From Whole Slide Histopathological Images, Dheeraj Ganti

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Lung Cancer is one of the most serious diseases causing death for human be- ings. The progression of the disease and response to treatment di ers widely among patients. Thus it is very important to classify the type of tumor and also able to predict the clinical outcomes of patients. Majority of lung cancers is Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) which constitutes of 84 % of all the type of lung cancers. The two major subtypes of NSCLC are Adenocarcinoma (ADC) and Squamous Cell Car- cinoma (SCC). Accurate classi cation of the lung cancer as NSCLC and its subtype classi …

Quantitative Analysis Of Scalable Nosql Databases, Surya Narayanan Swaminathan

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

NoSQL databases are rapidly becoming the customary data platform for big data applications. These databases are emerging as a gateway for more alternative approaches outside traditional relational databases and are characterized by efficient horizontal scalability, schema-less approach to data modeling, high performance data access, and limited querying capabilities. The lack of transactional semantics among NoSQL databases has made the application determine the choice of a particular con- sistency model. Therefore, it is essential to examine methodically, and in detail, the performance of different databases under different workload conditions. In this work, three of the most commonly used NoSQL databases: MongoDB, …

Speaker Identification In Live Events Using Twitter, Minumol Joseph

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

The prevalence of social media has given rise to a new research area. Data from social media is now being used in research to gather deeper insights into many different fields. Twitter is one of the most popular microblogging websites. Users express themselves on a variety of different topics in 140 characters or less. Oftentimes, users “tweet” about issues and subjects that are gaining in popularity, a great example being politics. Any development in politics frequently results in a tweet of some form. The research which follows focuses on identifying a speaker’s name at a live event by collecting and …

Interactive Dashboard For User Activity Using Network Flow Data, Lalit Kumar Naidu

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Data visualization is critical in analytical systems containing multi-dimensional dataset and problems associated with increasing data size. It facilitates the data explanation process of reasoning data and discovering trends with visual perception that are otherwise not evident within the data in its raw form. The challenge involved in visualization is presenting data in such a way that helps end users in the process of information discovery with simple visuals. Interactive visualizations have increasingly become popular in recent years with prominent research in the field of information visualization. These techniques are heavily used in web-based applications to present myriad forms of …

Energy And Water Impacts Of Data Center Cooling Systems: A Triple Bottom Line Assessment For Facility Design, Marianna Louisa Vallejo

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Increasingly, society is being transferred to a dependence upon electronic technologies and networked systems, usually accessed via the internet. Physically, these systems reside within clusters of servers and storage banks which are collectively housed and maintained in data center facilities. In order for a data center to function properly, the environment must be tightly controlled to ensure maximum reliability of the electronic hardware components. Any method of controlling the environment has a cost, either in capital or in resources, and therefore becomes an issue for the sustainability of a building or complex. Currently data centers are one of the largest …

Development Of A Methodology And Sample Preparation To Evaluate Reliability Of Oil Cooled Data Center, Venkata Naga Indu Sravani Kota

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Liquid immersion cooling is not a new concept which is slowly emerging as an alternative solution to conventional chilled air cooling systems for data centers. The main idea is to build a body of knowledge to help industry make more informed regarding mechanical reliability of IT equipment in mineral oil immersed systems. The goal is to develop a testing procedure for evaluating the reliability of electronic packages and components when immersed in mineral oil. PCB’s, chip packages, passive components like capacitors, inductors, resistors, diodes, cables and wiring form the most important parts of a server used in data centers. The …

Neural Network Modeling And Control Of Data Center, Nachiket Rajendra Kansara

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Data Center has become a definitive element of Modern IT infrastructure. With the development of high performance computing architectures and equipment, data centers consume large amount of electricity. Due to low Demand/Supply ratio of electricity production there is need to develop ways to reduce power footprint. Many researchers are working on approaches to resolve problems related to en- ergy usage of Data Center. One of these approaches is to develop a model-based control system that would control data centers in efficient way to reduce power footprint. Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) has been used to model the dynamic and complex environment …

Non Thermal Reliability Considerations For Oil Cooled Data Centers And Its Serviceability, Sahithi Reddy Nagilla

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

The interest in Oil immersion cooling is increasing day by day which can be attributed to the recent research that shows the potential of its performance when compared to other techniques that add a little more expenses to the organization. Even though the performance of oil immersion cooling has its own capabilities and advantages, this technique is not widely adopted and there is limited published information regarding the important aspects of the design of the system. This paper presents the non-thermal aspects of oil immersion cooling and explains the chemistry of mineral oil and the factors that affect its performance. …

Quantitative Evaluation Of A Thrust Vector Controlled Transport At The Conceptual Design Phase, Vincent Patrick Ricketts

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

The impetus to innovate, to push the bounds and break the molds of evolutionary design trends, often comes from competition but sometimes requires catalytic political legislature. For this research endeavor, the ‘catalyzing legislation’ comes in response to the rise in cost of fossil fuels and the request put forth by NASA on aircraft manufacturers to show reduced aircraft fuel consumption of +60% within 30 years. This necessitates that novel technologies be considered to achieve these values of improved performance. One such technology is thrust vector control (TVC). The beneficial characteristic of thrust vector control technology applied to the traditional tail-aft …

The Effect Of Temperature And Relative Humidity On The Corrosion Rates Of Copper And Silver In Electronic Equipment In The Presence Of Sulfur Environment, Kanan Pujara

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Data center consume a significant amount of energy for the continuous air-conditioning of the servers with high internal heat loads and to maintain the indoor temperatures within recommended operating levels as recommended by ASHRAE. As an alternate source to air-conditioning, air-side economizers are used to reduce power consumption. However, there is a reluctance in using this technique due to undetermined equipment reliability by introducing outside air pollutants which over time could cause failures. There is a need to know the degree of reliability degradation when the equipment is operated, outside the recommended range, in the allowable temperature-humidity range in geographies …

Estimation Of Fracture Mechanics Parameters In 3d Tsv Package During Chip Attachment Process, Mohammed Shahid Ali

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Nowadays, the packaging of electronic products is becoming revolutionized, since the packages are becoming more and more complex, dense, thinner and lighter for greater portability. Miniaturization of packages is being taken to the next level, and hence, 3D packaging has become a hot topic in the present research area. Three dimensional chips stacking with TSV technology has gained momentum to meet such requirements of significant miniaturization and power reduction which result in increased performance. However, the unique issues related to yield and reliability of critical areas in TSV based 3D ICs need to be evaluated. Therefore, Reliability of such electronic …

Enhancement Of Fog-Collection Efficiency Of A Raschel Mesh Using Surface Coatings And Geometric Changes, Mithun Rajaram

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

In a few countries, such as Chile, a Raschel mesh is widely used in the field to collect fog. In this work, we explored the possibility of enhancing fog-collection efficiency of a typical Raschel mesh through surface modification and geometric changes. We demonstrated about 100% enhancement in the fog-collection efficiency.

Tbi Induced Rate Dependent Viscoelastic Response Of Axon: Predictions From A Mathematical Model, Manikanta Jonnalagadda

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) accounts to almost one fifth of total fatal injuries. Even though there are various mechanisms hypothesized for the causes leading to TBI, diffuse axonal injury (DAI) is found to be the most observed criterion. The reason for axonal failure in DAI has been studied extensively using experimental and computational models. It was found that axons behave like viscoelastic materials, thus exhibiting rate dependent behavior under loading. This viscoelastic behavior of axons is believed to drive the failure of axons and its substructures. It was observed that axon failure is caused by failures and distortions in axonal …

Additive Manufacturing Methodologies For Multi Process And Multi Material Scenarios, Tushar Saini

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Additive Manufacturing processes have been developing and continuously improving but are primarily constrained to single materials, albeit some commercial multi extrusion 3D printers do exist where by it is possible to print with multi-colored fluidic polymers or at most two filaments of the same type. 3D printing an object with volumetric varying properties requires manual modification of the G-Code, not a feasible option considering the average size of G-Code generated by the slicing software. This research focuses on developing a post processing methodology that modifies the large G-Code files generated by the slicing software according to user requirements. The proposed …

Progesterone And Prostaglandin F2Α Induce Species-Typical Female Preferences For Male Sexual Displays In Cope's Gray Treefrog (Hyla Chrysoscelis), J. L. Ward, E. K. Love, Alexander T. Baugh, N. M. Gordon, J. C. Tanner, M. A. Bee

Biology Faculty Works

Endocrine systems play critical roles in facilitating sexual behavior in seasonally breeding vertebrates. Much of the research exploring this topic has focused on the endocrine correlates of signaling behavior in males and sexual proceptivity in females. What is less understood is how hormones promote the expression of the often complex and highly selective set of stimulus–response behaviors that are observed in naturally breeding animals. In female frogs, phonotaxis is a robust and sensitive bioassay of mate choice and is exhibited by gravid females during the breeding season. In stark contrast, females exhibit low phonotactic responsiveness outside the breeding season, but …

Landfill Volume Gain From The Diversion Of Construction And Demolition Waste, Aayush Raj Tiwary

Civil Engineering Theses - Archive

Construction and Demolition (C&D) waste is one of the major components of the solid waste and is defined as a waste stream resulting from the construction, renovation and demolition of structures such as buildings, roads, and bridges. The amount of C&D waste has been in an upsurge with rapid growth in construction works and is expected to grow even more. As such, the effective waste management for C&D disposal has been a global issue owing to the increasing construction works worldwide. Although landfill disposal of C&D waste is not the preferred method of the C&D waste management, a significant portion …

Resources, Innovative Outcomes, And The Symbolic And Substantive Performance Of Entrepreneurial Firms: An Examination Of Independent Popular Music Artists, John A. Deleon

Management Dissertations - Archive

The importance of innovation to the success of entrepreneurial firms has been well established in prior work. Yet, important gaps still remain. I draw from the innovation literature, the resource-based view, and institutional theory in order to address how entrepreneurial firms are able to find success through innovation in competitive environments. Specifically, following Penrose’s (1959) approach to the resource-based view, I argue that two resource categories, creativity-related resources and management-related resources, form antecedent conditions for innovative outcomes. I divide these innovative outcomes into two separate components, innovative output and innovative uniqueness. Further, I argue that innovative output and innovative uniqueness …

Predictors Of Persistence In Online Graduate Nursing Students, Denise Cauble

Nursing Dissertations - Archive

Persistence is an important measure of success for individual students and institutions of higher learning. The purpose of this study was to explore personal and academic factors that influence persistence in online graduate nursing students. A predictive correlational study design was used. Data were extracted from existing student records in two online graduate programs within a large, urban college of nursing. A sample size of 197 graduate nursing students was selected, 94 who persisted to graduation from their program within 36 months and 103 who did not. Age, gender, race/ethnicity, undergraduate GPA, undergraduate education (BSN or RN-BSN level) were examined …

Enterprise Risk Management (Erm) At U.S. Colleges And Universities: Administration Processes Regarding The Adoption, Implementation, And Integration Of Erm, Anne E. Lundquist

Dissertations

The variety, type and volume of risks affecting higher education are numerous and the consequences for unmanaged risks and missed opportunities are more significant than ever before. In response, many institutions of higher education are adopting an Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) approach. External factors, as well as institutional culture, play a role in the decision to adopt ERM, as well as the path of implementation. Because higher education has unique characteristics that differentiate it from other organizations, particularly a shared governance structure, the adoption and implementation decisions, and resulting ERM frameworks, have aspects that make them unique to the higher …

Real Time Analytics On Digital Distraction, Kristian Welch

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Hypothesis: empirically measuring the users productivity has the potential to significantly increase their productivity. This paper is the documentation of the process of building software capable of verifying this hypothesis. Starting with the research which gives enough evidence to warrant the hypothesis, also included is commentary on the prototyping, design decisions, and iteration based on user feedback of the software.

Digital Peacekeepers, Drone Surveillance And Information Fusion: A Philosophical Analysis Of New Peacekeeping, Lisa Portmess, Bassam Romaya

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In June 2014 an Expert Panel on Technology and Innovation in UN Peacekeeping was commissioned to examine how technology and innovation could strengthen peacekeeping missions. The panel's report argues for wider deployment of advanced technologies, including greater use of ground and airborne sensors and other technical sources of data, advanced data analytics and information fusion to assist in data integration. This article explores the emerging intelligence-led, informationist conception of UN peacekeeping against the backdrop of increasingly complex peacekeeping mandates and precarious security conditions. New peacekeeping with its heightened commitment to information as a political resource and the endorsement of offensive …