Digital Commons Network^™

Reconceptualizing Privacy: An Examination Of The Developing Regulatory Regime For Facial Recognition Technology, David James Potter

Theses and Dissertations

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration have convened a series of meetings to create a voluntary code of conduct for the commercial use of facial recognition technology. This research asks and answers three questions related to the creation of the voluntary code of conduct: 1) How is the regulatory regime of FRT emerging in the U.S.? 2) What are the roles of the various stakeholders in shaping the commercial regulation of FRT? 3) How does FRT challenge our current conceptions of privacy? Data has been gathered to answer these questions using participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The data was analyzed …

Radiation Shielding Approaches For Planetary Surface Exploration: A Mars Case Study For Und Concepts, Arturo Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

Surface stays on Mars may expose astronauts to high radiation doses from solar flares and galactic cosmic radiation (GCR). We estimated shielding required for a surface habitat, and assessed environments inside a planetary rover and space suit, under historically severe solar flare and GCR conditions, using the HZETRN radiation computer code. A 1m layer of Mars regolith can protect the habitat up to 30 km surface elevation. Polyethylene at 5, 10, and 15 g/cm2 can protect up to 0, 10, and 20 km, respectively. The rover protects from acute exposure up to -0.7 km while a space suit protects up …

Factors Affecting Unsatisfactory Performance During Air-To-Air Refueling In The C-17 Pilot Checkout Course, Richard Smith

Theses and Dissertations

In 2014, the USAF reduced its personnel by approximately 20,000. One of the areas hit hardest by the cuts were the faculty at the USAF C-17 formal training unit, where students are trained to fly the C-17 transport plane. Due to the reduction in forces, faculty staffing dropped by 30% though the number of students remained the same. Air-to-air refueling during the Pilot Checkout Course is the most commonly failed syllabus event. When a student fails to progress on a syllabus event, it requires additional instructor, simulator, and aircraft resources. In an effort to reduce the amount of failures and …

Recall Of Novel Words In Adolescents Following A Brief Mindfulness Exercise, Anna Lauren Schimmelpfennig

Theses and Dissertations

Mindfulness has been associated with various benefits, including enhanced attention, improved recall, and increased emotional well-being. Previous research has suggested that a brief mindfulness exercise can enhance recall of novel words in female college students. Participants in the current study were 82 students (41 female, M = 14.6, SD = 1.2) from a rural, Midwestern secondary school. Participants were randomly assigned to listen to a 20-minute body scan exercise or a control lecture before learning English-Swahili word pairs. Results revealed no significant effect of group on immediate or delayed recall of word pairs. Additionally, there was no significant effect of …

The Impact Of Victim Age And Religious Affiliation On Perceptions Of Cleric Sex Offenders, Kaylee Ann Stone

Theses and Dissertations

The present study examined perceptions of sex offenders using a 2 (victim age: 11-year-old vs. 15-year-old) X 2 (type of sexual offense: rape vs. statutory rape) X 3 (affiliation of the perpetrator: public school teacher vs. Catholic priest teacher vs. Lutheran pastor teacher) factorial design. Participants (N = 286) were asked to read one of 12 vignettes describing charges of improper sexual activity between a male teacher and his male student. Results indicated that participants recommended a shorter sentence and registry level, attributed more blame to the victim and less to the offender, and found the victim more mentally unstable …

The Impact Of Macroeconomic Variables On A Vector-Autoregressive Forecast Of Small Ticket Equipment Lease And Loan Portfolio Performance, Brian Max Schonfeld

Theses and Dissertations

Equipment financing is a trillion dollar industry that covers small and medium sized businesses across the entire spectrum of business categories. These transactions are typically scored utilizing the owners’ personal credit, with business credit adding additional information to the credit decision. For this paper, the portfolio performance of a publically traded company that finances small ticket equipment leases and loans will be examined. Utilizing data points gathered from thousands of leases and loans over a four-year period, transactions were run through three different econometric models and forecasted for a subsequent two-month period. Macroeconomic variables were then introduced to the econometric …

Nonword Repetition And Sentence Repetition In Preschool Children: A Comparison Of Speech And Language Screening Measures, Rachel Therrien

Theses and Dissertations

Nonword repetition tasks and sentence repetition tasks have been shown to accurately differentiate children with speech and/or language disorders from their typically developing peers (Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998; Archibald & Gathercole, 2006). Additionally, they provide information on semantic, syntactical, and phonological processing as well as memory and acoustic perceptual skills (Vance, Stackhouse, & Wells, 2005). Despite their utility as a screening measure, their use in clinical practice has been minimal. Instead, practicing speech-language pathologists often choose to use publisher-provided screening measures or their own developed measures, rather than using research-based screening methods that have recognized differential diagnosis ability (Nash, Leavett, …

The Relationships Among Imagery Use, Imagery Ability And Mental Toughness In Adolescent Figure Skaters, Michele Marie Sullivan

Theses and Dissertations

Coaches and athletes have requested strategies that develop and maintain mental toughness because they find it to be an essential part of performance (Clough, Earle, & Sewell, 2002). Yet, little research has been conducted to examine psychological skills that contribute to gain and maintain mental toughness. This study examines imagery and mental toughness in adolescent figure skaters. Imagery use was assessed by the Sport Imagery Questionnaire- Children (Hall, Munroe-Chandler, & Fishburne, 2009) and imagery ability with the Movement Imagery Questionnaire-Children (Martini, Carter, Yoxon, Cumming, & Ste-Marie, submitted December 2014). Mental toughness was assessed using the Mental Toughness Index (Gucciardi, Hanton, …

The Impact Of A Brief Mindfulness Exercise On Autobiographical Memory Specificity In Trauma-Exposed College Students, Katie Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

When comparing performance on the Autobiographical Memory Task (AMT) between individuals who have been exposed to traumatic events and those who have not, individuals exposed to traumatic events tend to provide autobiographical memories that are more often characterized as being overgeneral with relatively fewer memories that reference a particular date or time. Studies have found that post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) may be particularly responsible for this effect. Researchers have posited that this effect may be due to cognitive overload from avoiding negative memories, or from shallow retrieval of the memory in order to avoid further emotional discomfort. Mindfulness training, which …

Prediction Of Aircraft Fuselage Vibration, Rohan Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

Modern unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are made of lightweight structures, owing to the demand for longer ranges and heavier payloads. These lightweight aircraft are more susceptible to vibrations caused by atmospheric turbulence transmitted to the fuselage from the wings. These vibrations, which can cause damage to the payload or on board avionics present a serious problem, since air turbulence is expected to increase over the next few decades, due to climate change.

The objective of this thesis is to predict the vibration of an aircraft fuselage by establishing a relationship between wing and fuselage vibration. A combination of ANSYS® and …

Tracking Star Formation In Dwarf Cluster Galaxies, Cody Millard Rude

Theses and Dissertations

The evolution of galaxies in dense environments can be affected by close encounters with neighboring galaxies and interactions with the intracluster medium (ICM). Dwarf galaxies may be especially susceptible to these effects due to their low mass. The goal of my dissertation research is to look for signs of star formation in cluster dwarf galaxies by measuring and comparing the r- and u-band luminosity functions of 15 low redshift Abell galaxy clusters using archival data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). Luminosity functions, dwarf-to-giant ratios, and blue fractions are measured in four cluster-centric annuli from stacked cluster data. To account for …

Prevalence Of Haemoparasites And West Nile Virus Seropositivity In Song Birds (Passeriformes) From Northwest Mn And Behavioral Aspects Of Microfilariae, Chad Allan Stromlund

Theses and Dissertations

Mosquitoes transmit arboviruses, haemosporidian protozoa (e.g., malaria), and filarioid nematodes. Many of these mosquito-borne pathogens occur together and transmission cycles are occurring concurrently. Despite this, mosquito pathogen transmission cycles are largely studied independently of one another. Considering the large temporal and spatial overlap among these various transmission cycles, the question becomes, what kinds of interactions are occurring between parasite transmission cycles and arboviral transmission cycles? Also, some species of mosquito are incapable of transmitting some species of arbovirus. Therefore, there must be natural barriers to prevent arbovirus infection and transmission. These barriers include the midgut barrier and the salivary gland …

The N-Terminus Of Type Iii Secretion Needle Protein Yscf From Yersinia Pestis Functions To Modulate Innate Immune Responses, Patrick Osei-Owusu

Theses and Dissertations

The type III secretion system is employed by many pathogens, including the genera Yersinia, Shigella, Pseudomonas, and Salmonella, to deliver effector proteins into eukaryotic cells. The injectisome needle is formed by the polymerization of a single protein, e.g., YscF (Yersinia pestis), PscF (Pseudomonas aeruginosa), PrgI (Salmonella enterica SPI-1), SsaG (Salmonella enterica SPI-2), or MxiH (Shigella flexneri). In this study, we demonstrated that the N termini of some needle proteins, particularly the N terminus of YscF from Yersinia pestis, influences host immune responses. The N termini of several needle proteins were truncated and tested for the ability to induce inflammatory responses …

The Relationship Between Interrogative Suggestibility And Decision-Making, Darci Van Dyke

Theses and Dissertations

Interrogative suggestibility is the individual's tendency to yield to misleading questions and negative feedback. Individuals who exhibit this tendency have been found to be more likely to falsely confess to a crime, a decision with often severe negative consequences. Many individual differences in cognition, emotion, and personality have been linked with interrogative suggestibility. These individual differences have also been found to be related to an individual's decision-making ability. However, the relationship between interrogative suggestibility and decision-making has not been investigated. The current project sought to determine how decision-making abilities, cognitive ability, memory, and anxiety predict variability in interrogative suggestibility. Results …

An Investigation Of Six Poorly Described Close Visual Double Stars Using Speckle Interferometry, Daniel B. Wallace

Theses and Dissertations

Continued observation of double stars is necessary for confirmation of binarity and to provide updates to astrometric data used to compute accurate binary orbital parameters, thereby more accurately informing stellar mass estimations – the critical parameter from which stellar models are derived. In October of 2013, six double stars from the Washington Double Star (WDS) catalog exhibiting close separations, as well as significant deviations from previously published orbits, were observed and imaged using the speckle interferometric technique on the 2.1-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in Arizona. The observations of the six double stars occurred as part of …

Disaggregating Tree And Grass Phenology In Tropical Savannas, Qiang Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Savannas are mixed tree-grass systems and as one of the world’s largest biomes represent an important component of the Earth system affecting water and energy balances, carbon sequestration and biodiversity as well as supporting large human populations. Savanna vegetation structure and its distribution, however, may change because of major anthropogenic disturbances from climate change, wildfire, agriculture, and livestock production. The overstory and understory may have different water use strategies, different nutrient requirements and have different responses to fire and climate variation. The accurate measurement of the spatial distribution and structure of the overstory and understory are essential for understanding the …

Two-Phase Flow Pressure Drop In Circular Small Channels With Abrupt Contraction And Expansion, Che-Hao Yang

Theses and Dissertations

Gas-liquid phase flow pressure drops occurred in circular channels with sudden contraction or expansion have been studied and investigated experimentally. Especially, water and nitrogen gas phases as experimental fluids were applied in this study. In this study, single phase, deionized water, and two phase, deionized water and nitrogen gas mixture, were under investigation and observation. The diameters of the test channels were 0.5, 0.375, 0.315, 0.19 and 0.14 inches. The setup of the contraction channels, 0.5 to 0.375 inches, 0.5 to 0.315 inches, 0.5 to 0.19 inches, and 0.5 to 0.14 inches were applied. For studying the expansion channels, the …

Powwow As Spaces Of Public: Circulated Meanings Of A Native Practice For Non-Natives, Joshua Eugene Young

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the status of the relationship between Natives and non-Natives utilizing powwow as the representative anecdote of the intercultural space of interaction between these two groups. Where most scholars ask how Native Americans use powwow to reclaim Native identity, I shift the focus to non-Natives, whose relationship to powwow has gone largely unexamined. I argue that powwow serves as a public space for staging diversity for non-Natives, a fact that has wide-ranging implications for Natives, too. Utilizing rhetorical theories of ritual communication and publicity as a way to interrogate this relationship, I argue that the publics attending to …

Beyond Batterers: A Primary Prevention And Adult Learning Approach To Engage Well-Meaning Men To Prevent Violence Against Women, Lorett Sturgill Swank

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This purpose of this research is to examine the critical issue of intimate partner violence and to explore a how non-battering “well-meaning men” can help to end this violence against women. Domestic violence has been primarily considered a women’s issue, and current efforts to prevent this violence have been led mostly by women. In spite of these efforts, violence against women still persists and “well-meaning men” have not been part of a proactive solution. This growing movement to engage men in preventing violence against women, empowers men to learn about and identify the issues that support a culture that tolerates …

Marine Boundary Layer Cloud And Drizzle Properties Over Arm Azores Site, Peng Wu

Theses and Dissertations

In this study, a new method has been developed to retrieve the marine boundary layer (MBL) cloud microphysical properties, which provides a complete diurnal variation of MBL cloud properties for 19-month dataset at the Azores. All nighttime monthly means of cloud liquid water path (LWP) exceed their daytime counterparts with an annual mean LWP of 140 g m-2, which is ~30.9 g m-2 larger than the daytime mean. The seasonal and diurnal variations of cloud LWC and optical depth basically follow the variation of LWP. There are, however, no significant day-night differences and diurnal variations in cloud-droplet effective radius (re) …

I. Synthesis Of Ascarosides For Chemical Biology Studies In Caenorhabditis Elegans, Ii. A Photochemical Approach To Delavayine, And Iii. Remote Hydroxylation By Radical Translocation And Polar Crossover, Kyle Allen Hollister

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The foci of this dissertation are the synthesis of analogs for chemical biology studies, synthetic chemistry method development (with an emphasis on photochemistry), and the application of these methods toward total synthesis. Chapter 1 outlines the synthesis of an array of pheromone analogs that are derivatives of the dideoxy sugar ascarylose. Referred to as ascarosides, such compounds have recently been shown to influence important biological processes in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. C. elegans secretes ascarosides into its environment, where the compounds then act as signaling molecules by providing information on factors like population density. Chapter 2 describes the biological …

Straight Ahead: The Life, Pedagogy, And Influence Of Dennis L. Schneider, Louie Colton Sperry Eckhardt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The career of Dennis L. ‘Denny’ Schneider, Professor of Trumpet at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 1961-1996, was expansive. From small town Nebraska, Schneider graduated from the University of Nebraska and Indiana University. After serving in the USAF Strategic Air Command Band, and teaching public school music, Schneider began teaching at the University of Nebraska. He served as principal trumpet of the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra, Omaha Symphony Orchestra, and the Nebraska Chamber Orchestra for decades. Schneider also served as principal trumpet for the Cabrillo Summer Festival Orchestra, and performed and recorded with the Summit Brass. He was the recipient of …

New Identification And Decoding Techniques For Low-Density Parity-Check Codes, Tian Xia

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Error-correction coding schemes are indispensable for high-capacity high data-rate communication systems nowadays. Among various channel coding schemes, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes introduced by pioneer Robert G. Gallager are prominent due to the capacity-approaching and superior error-correcting properties. There is no hard constraint on the code rate of LDPC codes. Consequently, it is ideal to incorporate LDPC codes with various code rate and codeword length in the adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) systems which change the encoder and the modulator adaptively to improve the system throughput. In conventional AMC systems, a dedicated control channel is assigned to coordinate the encoder/decoder changes. …

Development Of Satellite-Assisted Forecasting System For Oyster Norovirus Outbreaks, Jiao Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Norovirus outbreaks can cause the closure of oyster harvesting waters and acute gastroenteritis in humans associated with consumption of contaminated raw oysters. The overall goal of this study was to develop a satellite-assisted forecasting system for oyster norovirus outbreaks. The forecasting system is comprised of three components: (1) satellite algorithms for retrieval of environmental variables, including salinity, temperature, and gage height, (2) an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based model, called NORF model, for predicting relative risk levels of oyster norovirus outbreaks, and (3) a mapping method for visualizing spatial distributions of norovirus outbreak risks in oyster harvest areas along Louisiana …

Analysis Of Nonlinear Dispersive Model Equations, Jacob Grey

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this work we begin with a brief survey of the classical fluid dynamics problem of water waves, and then proceed to derive well known evolution equations via a Hamiltonian Variational approach. This method was first introduced in the seminal work of Walter Craig, et al. \cite{CG}. The distinguishing feature of this scheme is that the Dirichlet-Neumann operator of the fluid domain appears explicitly in the Hamiltonian. In the second and third chapters, we utilize the Hamiltonian perturbation theory introduced in \cite{CG} to derive the Benjamin-Bona-Mahony (BBM) and Benjamin-Bona-Mahony-Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (BBM-KP)equations. Finally, we briefly review the existence theory for their corresponding …

String Searching With Ranking Constraints And Uncertainty, Sudip Biswas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Strings play an important role in many areas of computer science. Searching pattern in a string or string collection is one of the most classic problems. Different variations of this problem such as document retrieval, ranked document retrieval, dictionary matching has been well studied. Enormous growth of internet, large genomic projects, sensor networks, digital libraries necessitates not just efficient algorithms and data structures for the general string indexing, but indexes for texts with fuzzy information and support for queries with different constraints. This dissertation addresses some of these problems and proposes indexing solutions. One such variation is document retrieval query …

Essays On Sub-National Economic Growth: Evidence From A Global Sample, Dachao Ruan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I make three important contributions to the literature on regional economics. In Chapter 2, I construct a measure of early development, urban population density (urban population relative to total land area), that is novel to the growth literature, and apply GIS techniques to define and locate regions/cities and obtain geographic and historical measures across regions and cities. Chapter 3 investigates the persistence in sub-national development over the past 150 years. I find that regions that had a relatively higher urban population density in 1850 tend to be relatively more developed today. Geographic and climatic characteristics are significantly …

The Stratigraphy And Depositional History Of The Deadwood Formation, With A Focus On Early Paleozoic Subsidence In The Williston Basin, Anthony Henry Sarnoski

Theses and Dissertations

The Deadwood Formation is an assemblage of siliciclastic, carbonate, and evaporite sedimentary rocks in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. The majority of the lateral extent of the Deadwood Formation is in the subsurface of the Williston Basin, where it is the basal lithostratigraphic unit. Deposition began roughly 501 million years ago, as the Sauk sequence reached the exposed Precambrian igneous and metamorphic rock of the North American Craton.

Six identifiable and widespread gamma ray markers occur in the well logs, dividing the formation into six informal units, label members A through F in ascending order. The …

3-D Geocellular Model Of The Duperow Formation In Southwestern North Dakota, Kyle D. Shurtliff

Theses and Dissertations

The Duperow Formation of southwestern North Dakota is Devonian in age, and forms the lower part of the Jefferson Group within the Kaskaskia Sequence. This shallow marine shelf deposit is a cyclical carbonate evaporite, and is comprised of dolomitic mudstones, gypsum, multiple bioclastic wackestones/packstones, stromatoporoid boundstone and anhydrite.

There is a long history of oil production in this formation dating back to the 1950’s in North Dakota. By 1989, the Duperow Formation was the second most prolific hydrocarbon producer on the Billings Anticline in North Dakota, and therefore was studied extensively. Environmental factors during deposition as well as diagenetic processes …

The Relationship Between A Series Of Vitamin D Levels And A Blood Glucose Level In Pregnant Women In The Upper Midwest, Jeanine Louise Senti

Theses and Dissertations

Hyperglycemia during pregnancy is associated with adverse outcomes for both mother and offspring. In order to facilitate glucose delivery to the fetus, insulin resistance increases as gestation progresses which results in hyperglycemia if the mother’s body is unable to compensate by producing adequate insulin in response to these changes in glucose metabolism. Evidence suggests that calcidiol (vitamin D) influences insulin sensitivity and glucose metabolism in the non-pregnant population yet there are inconsistent findings on the effects of calcidiol on maternal glucose levels during pregnancy. A secondary analysis was completed on a de-identified data set. The original prospective study included a …