Digital Commons Network^™

Ruthenium Hydride Catalyzed Silylvinylation Of Alkynes, Robert J. Wilson

Dissertations - ALL

The intermolecular ruthenium hydride catalyzed coupling of internal alkynes with subsequent insertion of olefin acceptors is described. This approach utilizes a vinyl silicon tether to provide complete regiocontrol, a stereoselective anti-exo-dig cyclization which affords a tetrasubstituted olefin with a new vinylsilane, and a highly functionalized Z,E diene motif. Subsequent studies for a highly selective intramolecular trans-silylvinylation of internal alkynes catalyzed by RuHCl(CO)(SIMes)(PPh3) is reported. The use of methyl vinyl ketone as an additive increased the efficiency of this transformation. This process was expanded upon using ethylene gas as an additive and provides a net 5-exo-dig trans-silylvinylation of internal alkynes. Ethylene …

Mckee Minute Holiday 2015, Southern Adventist University

McKee Minute – McKee Library This Month

The Holiday 2015 McKee Minute features include the books Christmas in the Trenches by John McCutcheon and A Northern Christmas by Rockwell Kent, the films The Gospel of John and Lee Strobel: The Case for Christ, and the periodicals Stand Firm and Journey. This month's spotlight is on archaeology.

Assessment Of Ell Written Language Progress In Designated Esl Noncredit Courses At The Community College Level, Janet L. Daugherty

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

Assessment of the effect of targeted instruction of functional language skills for English language learners (ELL) enrolled in community college basic skills classes is important as community colleges continue to offer noncredit courses for ELL students designed to improve English skills. The Foundations Skills Committee at a community college in a rural setting in Northern California received a State of California grant to provide basic skills instruction, specifically grammar and sentence structure, to ELL. The present study evaluates the effect of Supplemental Instruction (SI) on improving functional skills in writing.

A review of the literature reveals that community college instructors …

Elements Of A Strategic Implementation Plan: Implications For Enhancing Combination Classes Using A Multiage Framework, Tracy Harding

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

Combination classes are often created out of financial necessity rather than a desire to engage students in multiage learning. Teachers assigned to these classrooms come from the general teaching pool and may not have specialized training around the intricacies of multiage teaching.

A review of the literature indicates that the United States has a long history of multiage classrooms. When the practice of graded schools took over, however the multiage school remained as an approach to teaching children (Anderson, 1992). Progressive education programs often use a multiage classroom paired with looping, students remaining with the same teacher for more than …

Nebraska County Population Projections: 2010 To 2050, David Drozd

Past Publications

There are many potential uses of understanding how the population might change into the future.Population projections help us to plan and prepare for likely demographic changes. Using the current population structure and applying birth, death, and net migration rates and how they change for various ages provides a glimpse of the changes and shifts that are likely to occur as well as the timing of such changes.

Nebraska County Population Projections: 2010 To 2050, David J. Drozd, Jerry Deichert

Past Publications

There are many potential uses of understanding how the population might change into the future. Population projections help us to plan and prepare for likely demographic changes. Using the current population structure and applying birth, death, and net migration rates and how they change for various ages provides a glimpse of the changes and shifts that are likely to occur as well as the timing of such changes.

This report presents population projections for each of Nebraska’s 93 counties, as well as the state total by summing the 93 county results. The report was supported in part by the Nebraska …

Information Technology For Development In Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Development is a concept that is often used to describe growth in organizations and the regions in which they reside. While research in Information Systems (IS) recognizes the importance of Information Technology (IT) in improving the organizational performance, a great deal of emphasis is given towards understanding large organizations. While social-economic development and transformation relies on new technological infrastructures and organizational changes, there is still a weak link between the organization studies with Information Technology (IT) as it relates to the growth of organizations. It appears that a greater research focus is needed in understanding the use of IT in …

Message From The Vice President For Research, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Notes From The Director, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

About The Mcnair Scholars Program, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Parallel K-D Tree Construction Using Pthreads, Emma B. Hamilton

Theses (Pre-2016)

N/A

Implementing Literacy Strategies And Activities To Help Math Students In Geometry, Amanda Cappelli

Education Masters

This study examines how literacy strategies and activates help math students learn geometry concepts and solve problems. Three literacy activities were implemented in a 10^th grade geometry classroom, and three students of different math abilities were interviewed. Student work was also analyzed and presented as part of the findings. The data collected revealed the following three themes: the helpfulness of literacy strategies differs for high and low achieving students, using visual representations led to more successful problem solving, and content area vocabulary was essential to know for achievement. The results from this study suggest that math teachers need to …

Mobilerp, Anthony Fata

Computer Engineering

MobilERP is a system that increases traceability of parts in a manufacturing process in a simple paperless way. The system contains three components, a desktop application, a mobile app, and a database. The mobile application allows employees to scan (using a bar code scanner) parts that they are working/finishing on during the manufacturing process. As the part goes down the assembly line, individuals will barcode scan using the app to track the progress. These changes would get updated to the database, where then the designated person can track the progress of the part as well as any problems or concerns …

Pthreads Profiler, Ryan Van Quinlan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to design and implement a program which would allow users to profile programs that utilize the Pthreads library. This profiler allows users to measure load balance and lock contention between threads as well as discover deadlocks. These tools can be essential to developers of multi-threaded applications, which are notoriously difficult to debug. Additionally, this tool can help find vital performance benefits by providing relative execution measurements. The profiler is written in C++ and utilizes the standard template library as well as glibc extensions.

The Effect Of A Social Skills Package On Initiations, Responses, And Turn-Taking In Young Children With Autism, Mary Elizabeth Ortman

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The current study was completed in the Spring of 2015 in an elementary special education classroom. This single-subject ABAB withdrawal design utilized a social skills curriculum, self-monitoring, and video-modeling to increase the initiations, responses, turns-taken, and total duration involved in social play in two first grade males with autism. Limitations included time constraints and the setting of a busy classroom. During 15-minute data sessions, participant one's initiations increased from a mean frequency of 2 during A1 to 28 during B2, responses increased from a mean frequency of 3 to 26, turn-taking increased from a mean frequency of 10 to 29, …

Design Of A Physical Windkessel Model For Use In Lvad In-Vitro Benchtop Modeling, Kyle W. Beggs

HIM 1990-2015

Despite improved life expectancy compared to medical management alone, Ventricular Assist Device (VAD) recipients show survival rates of 80% at 12 months and 70% at 24 months. A large portion of VAD-associated mortality results from increased risk of stroke with an event frequency reported between 14-47%. Recent concerns have been raised about unprecedented increases of thrombus formation in VAD recipients with subsequent reports pointing towards implantation techniques as a critical contributor to these events. Thus, the overall prognosis with mechanical support can improve by advancing the surgeon’s approach to VAD implantation. Previous studies using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) were aimed …

Effects Of Binary Solvent System On Morphology Of Particles, Patrick Besana

HIM 1990-2015

Recent advancements in cancer research has led to the synthesis of a new drug known as docetaxel. Meant to replace paclitaxel, its more natural counterpart whose ingredients are difficult to obtain, the drug is known to effectively treat a wide array of cancers, including breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and prostate cancer. The establishment of a synthetic alternative to paclitaxel has increased its bioavailability, thereby lowering the cost needed to utilize the drug. Still, the limiting factor in minimizing costs is the method in which the drug is processed. Current methods in drug processing have their limitations, which include the introduction …

Fabrication, Characterization, And Application Of Carbon Nanoparticles For The Detection Of Heavy Metal Ions In Aqueous Media, Aaron Michael Simpson

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This research set out to develop a method for producing Carbon nanoparticles (CNPs) from glycerol and use them to detect Cu2+, Hg2+, and Pb2+ ions in aqueous solution. Three synthesis methods were developed using the following mixtures: (1) glycerol and silica, (2) glycerol, silica, and H3PO4, and (3) glycerol with H3PO4. The structure of the particles was characterized using a variety of spectroscopic techniques. Size distributions were obtained from scanning electron microscopy images. The particles were spherical with average diameters of 66, 58, and 89 nm respectively and believed to consist of a carbon core with carboxylic acid and alcohol …

Mopeye: Monitoring Per-App Network Performance With Zero Measurement Traffic, Daoyuan Wu, Weichao Li, Rocky K. C. Chang, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile network performance measurement is important for understanding mobile user experience, problem diagnosis, and service comparison. A number of crowdsourcing measurement apps (e.g., MobiPerf and Netalyzr) have been embarked for the last few years. Unlike existing apps that use active measurement methods, we employ a novel passive-active approach to continuously monitor per-app network performance on unrooted smartphones without injecting additional network traffic. By leveraging the VpnService API on Android, MopEye, our measurement app, intercepts all network traffic and then relays them to their destinations using socket APIs. Therefore, not only MopEye can measure the round-trip time accurately, it can do …

Supercnn: A Superpixelwise Convolutional Neural Network For Salient Object Detection, Shengfeng He, Rynson W.H. Lau, Wenxi Liu, Zhe Huang, Qingxiong Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing computational models for salient object detection primarily rely on hand-crafted features, which are only able to capture low-level contrast information. In this paper, we learn the hierarchical contrast features by formulating salient object detection as a binary labeling problem using deep learning techniques. A novel superpixelwise convolutional neural network approach, called SuperCNN, is proposed to learn the internal representations of saliency in an efficient manner. In contrast to the classical convolutional networks, SuperCNN has four main properties. First, the proposed method is able to learn the hierarchical contrast features, as it is fed by two meaningful superpixel sequences, which …

On Top-K Selection In Multi-Armed Bandits And Hidden Bipartite Graphs, Wei Cao, Jian Li, Yufei Tao, Zhize Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper discusses how to efficiently choose from $n$ unknown distributions the $k$ ones whose means are the greatest by a certain metric, up to a small relative error. We study the topic under two standard settings---multi-armed bandits and hidden bipartite graphs---which differ in the nature of the input distributions. In the former setting, each distribution can be sampled (in the i.i.d. manner) an arbitrary number of times, whereas in the latter, each distribution is defined on a population of a finite size $m$ (and hence, is fully revealed after m samples). For both settings, we prove lower bounds on …

Children In Need Of Services: Toward A More Coherent Approach To Protecting New Jersey's Children And Families, John M. Cannel, Esq., Laura C. Tharney, Esq.

Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Synthesis Of Medicinally Relevant Thiazolyl Aryl Ketones Under Mild Conditions, Danielle M. Gardner

Health, Human Performance and Recreation Undergraduate Honors Theses

Purpose: The growing amount of clinical resistance observed in current antifungal drugs and in anti-HIV pharmaceuticals is a concern in the medical community. The purpose of this study is to develop a mild synthetic process for biomedically relevant thiazolyl aryl ketones that can be used to develop antifungal and anti-HIV drugs. We hypothesized that the proposed synthetic technique would be more efficient, produce fewer unwanted byproducts, and be more tolerant of functional groups than existing methods.

Methods: Prior to each of the ketone reactions, the necessary salt was synthesized by mixing thiazole and 9-bromofluorene neat in a reaction tube heated …

Leave No Soldier Behind? The Legality Of The Bowe Bergdahl Prisoner Swap, Steven M. Maffucci

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Aircraft Detection And Tracking Using Uav-Mounted Vision System, Yan Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

For unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to operate safely in the national airspace where non-collaborating flying objects, such as general aviation (GA) aircraft without automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B), exist, the UAVs' capability of “seeing" these objects is especially important. This “seeing", or sensing, can be implemented via various means, such as Radar or Lidar. Here we consider using cameras mounted on UAVs only, which has the advantage of light weight and low power. For the visual system to work well, it is required that the camera-based sensing capability should be at the level equal to or exceeding that of human pilots. …

High Pressure X-~Ray Absorption Spectroscopy Studies Of Heavy-~Fermion Cerium And Uranium Compounds, Daniel Antonio

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Investigations into f- electron heavy-fermion materials have revealed a wide range of novel behavior. Hydrostatic pressure is a valuable "clean" non-thermal parameter that can be used to systematically study them by tuning their ground state properties. The rare earth compound CeCu2Ge2 shows an unusual two-domed region of unconventional superconductivity under pressure, similar to its isostructural counterpart CeCu2Si2. While the lower pressure dome at about 10 GPa is caused by a magnetic quantum critical point (QCP), the higher one at about 16 GPa is less well understood. Previous structural measurements have indicated that it may be caused by critical valence fluctuations, …

Object Detection And Tracking In Wide Area Surveillance Using Thermal Imagery, Santosh Bhusal

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The main objective behind this thesis is to examine how existing vision-based detection and tracking algorithms perform in thermal imagery-based video surveillance. While color-based surveillance has been extensively studied, these techniques can not be used during low illumination, at night, or with lighting changes and shadows which limits their applicability. The main contributions in this thesis are (1) the creation of a new color-thermal dataset, (2) a detailed performance comparison of different color-based detection and tracking algorithms on thermal data and (3) the proposal of an adaptive neural network for false detection rejection.

Since there are not many publicly available …

Assessing The Importance Of Nurse Plant Associations To The Growth Of Pre-~Reproductive Yucca Brevifolia, Eric James Chameroy

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Facilitation and competition among plant species, in addition to abiotic factors, play an important role in determining plant community structure in arid and semi-arid environments. I conducted a study in Dry Lake Valley, Lincoln County, Nevada, USA to investigate the importance of nurse plant associations to pre-reproductive Yucca brevifolia (Joshua tree). Dry Lake Valley lies within a transition desert between the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts with ecotonal plant communities consisting of species representative of both deserts. A vegetation survey described the communities in which this study was conducted as a Y. brevifolia woodland dominated by an understory of Ephedra …

Chemical And Electronic Structure Of Surfaces And Interfaces In Cadmium Telluride Based Photovoltaic Devices, Douglas Arthur Duncan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The surface and interface properties are of the upmost importance in the understanding, optimization, and application for photovoltaic devices. Often the chemical, electronic, and morphological properties of the films are empirically optimized, however when progress slows, a fundamental understanding of these properties can lead to breakthroughs. In this work, surfaces and interfaces of solar cell-relevant films are probed with a repertoire of X-ray analytical and microanalysis techniques including X-ray photoelectron (XPS), X-ray excited Auger electron (XAES), X-ray emission (XES) spectroscopies, and atomic force (AFM) and scanning electron (SEM) microscopies.

Silicon-based devices currently dominate the solar market, which is rather inflexible …

Thank You For Your Time! Would You Mind Donating To Our Cause? The Effect Of Gratitude On Prosocial Behavior, Matthew L. Hortt

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A random assignment experiment examined the effects of three expressions of gratitude on two prosocial behaviors: volunteering and making monetary donations to charitable organizations. The results indicated that two of the expressions of gratitude had a significant opposite effect on the two prosocial behaviors. Both a verbal thank-you speech and a hand written thank-you note, resulted in a significant reduction in the amount of pledged volunteer hours, while resulting in a significant increase in the amount of pledged charitable dollars. The third expression of gratitude, a ten dollar thank-you gift card, produced no significant findings for either prosocial behavior. The …