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The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Engineering And Computer Science, Fall 2015, Ven Basco

Libraries' Newsletters

No abstract provided.

(261, 105, 42) Abelian Difference Sets Do Not Exist, James Robert Hufford Jr.

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Difference sets in the group Z3 x Z3 x Z37 and the group Z3 x Z9 x Z7 are known not to exist. The only open abelian case with a sylow-3 subgroup rank 2 listed in Vera-Lopez and Sanchez's table is Z3 x Z3 x Z29. We prove for Vera-Lopez and Sanchez's table that difference sets do not exist in the open group allowing the appropriate entry to be "no". We also prove that there exist no difference sets (261, 105, 42) for any group with order 261.

Features For Ranking Tweets Based On Credibility And Newsworthiness, Jacob W. Ross

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We create a robust and general feature set for learning to rank algorithms that rank tweets based on credibility and newsworthiness. In previous works, it has been demonstrated that when the training and testing data are from two distinct time periods, the ranker performs poorly. We improve upon previous work by creating a feature set that does not over fit a particular year or set of topics. This is critical given how people utilize social media changes as time progresses, and the topics discussed vary. In addition, we are constantly gaining new tweet data. Thus, it is important to be …

The Transfer Student Experience: Challenges And Institutional Support Systems For Undergraduate Transfer Students At A Public Four-Year University, Olivia Vanessa Matthews

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The transfer student population is rising on college campuses in the United States. Institutions of higher education should better understand how to support this growing, diverse population. This qualitative study of transfer students investigates what transitional challenges these students face, how they utilize institutional support services to assist them with these challenges, and if they feel appreciated, welcomed, and supported in their new environment. Focus group sessions and a demographic questionnaire were used to obtain data in this study. Participants invited to participate were second term transfer students who began at their current institution during the fall of 2014. Transfer …

Analysis Of The Tapered Transition Waveguide, Ryan J. Shaver

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The tapered transition waveguide is used in waveguide measurement systems for characterizing biaxial electromagnetic properties of materials, but its complex geometry does not support an analytic field solution. To ensure single-mode field behavior, the system includes sections of standard waveguides that only support the dominant mode. As a result, full-wave modeling and simulation of the system is exceedingly large.

Using the finite-element method to analyze the high-order modes at the junctions and to explore field configurations within the transition altering geometry, it is shown that besides the TE10 mode, the TE11 mode is significant. Then, two methods are proposed for …

Logging Debris Protects Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) Seedlings From White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus Virginianus) Herbivory In Wolf-Occupied Forest, Ari Erin Sullivan

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White-tailed deer are a species of great economic and ecological concern. Foresters sometimes leave logging debris known as slash on the forest floor with the intent to protect seedlings from deer herbivory and promote forest regeneration. I examined the effects of slash on rates of deer browsing on sugar maple seedlings in a forest of northern Wisconsin and measured deer foraging behavior using giving-up density and vigilance rates by employing trail cameras. Rates of browsed stems were almost twice as high in the open as within and adjacent to slash. These findings underscore the usefulness of slash for mitigating the …

Accelerated Degradation Of Chlorinated Solvents By Copper-Modified Nanoscale Zero Valent Iron (Cu-Nzvi) Stabilized With Carboxymethyl Cellulose, Andrew Franze

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Nanoscale zero valent iron (nZVI) is a remediation technology that can be used to treat chlorinated hydrocarbons (CHCs) in contaminated aquifers. Nanoparticles remain mobile in water and can be transported with groundwater flow to contaminated zones. However, due to magnetic and van der Waals forces, unstabilized nZVI agglomerates. Carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) was used as a polyelectrolyte stabilizer in this study. nZVI serves as an electron donor and can dechlorinate CHCs. nZVI reactivity with CHCs can be enhanced by addition of a secondary metal catalyst. This study evaluates the potential of copper amended nZVI (Cu-nZVI) to degrade select CHCs. The objective of …

The Impact Of Hsv-1 Infection On Cell Viability, Morphology, And Cd Markers Expression By Unpolarized And Cytokine-Polarized J774a.1 Mouse Macrophages, Sarah Saad Alsharif

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Macrophages play an important role in the immune system, particularly in neutralizing pathogens via phagocytosis and the production of multiple cytokines and chemokines that control infection after exposure to specific stimuli. Macrophages exhibit two different phenotypes, M1 and M2. This study evaluated the role of Suppressors of cytokine signaling (SOCS)1 and SOCS3 on Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV-1) infection of polarized macrophages, cell viability, cell morphology, and the expression of cell surface CD markers. I hypothesized that J774A.1 murine macrophages cells in the naive state (M0), and M1 and M2 phenotypes would display differences in CD markers CD80,CD163, and CD200R, cell …

Stability Of Monomethylmercury In Water, Sarah Elyse Harvey

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Monomethylmercury (MMHg) bioaccumulates in aquatic food webs, leading to concentrations in fish that increase health risks for humans who consume fish. As a result of processes that produce and decompose it, MMHg concentrations are notoriously unstable in many natural waters. I examined the stability of MMHg in both filter-sterilized (< 0.1 µm) reagent-grade water and 0.22-µm filtered sediment pore water from Grand Lake St. Marys, Auglaize and Mercer Counties, Ohio, each at three MMHg treatment concentrations (1, 5, and 50 ng/L). Reagent-grade water samples were incubated under both light and dark conditions at either 5 or 26 °C for 112 days. Pore water samples were incubated in the dark at 26 °C, mimicking environmental conditions, for a period of 98 days. Decay constants (± 95% CI) for solutions containing either 1 or 5 ng/L MMHg in reagent-grade water ranged from 0.0009 ± 0.0013 to 0.1225 ± 0.0150 d-1, with greater decay constants at higher temperature and no significant effect of light exposure. In contrast, decay constants for 50 ng/L MMHg in reagent-grade water were much less than those in more dilute solutions, ranging from 0.0018 ± 0.0015 to 0.0055 ± 0.0023 d-1, with both light and temperature influencing MMHg decomposition. Decay constants of MMHg in pore water were found to be independent of initial concentration of MMHg; however, decay constants in pore water samples were 3-fold higher than those in reagent-grade water amended with the same initial concentration (p = 0.007). These results suggest that natural constituents in pore water accelerate MMHg decay reactions.

Theoretical Throughput Capacity: Capabilities Of Human Information Processing During Multitasking, Aerial N. Camden

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Technological advancements in automation have allowed humans to collect data at exorbitant rates. As a result, human multitasking as become an integral part of many government, industrial, and routine activities. However, multitasking can be difficult to study, primarily due to the lack of objective metrics. The Human Operator Informatic Model (HOIM) is an information-theory based model that has been recently developed to combat these difficulties. The HOIM is based on Shannon information theory and can provide an objective, meaningful measure to describe system complexity and overall multitasking performance. The main goal of this work was to validate the HOIM as …

Identification And Quantification Of The Collagen Type I, Iii And V In Rabbit Patellar Tendons, Mahesh Chandra Kodali

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Tendon injuries pose a great clinical challenge to orthopedic surgeons. Over 200,000 patients undergo tendon repair every year in the United States alone. The role of progression of a tendon injury is multifactorial as a lot of factors come into play during and after the injury at various phases of healing process. There is a still a vast requirement for thorough elucidation and understanding of the pathophysiology and the factors involved in the progression of tendon injury. Although the degenerative role of several MMPs and ADAMTs have been reported, yet there is very less information on the actual role and …

An Improved Adaptive Filtering Approach For Removing Artifact From The Electroencephalogram, Justin Ronald Estepp

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The biophysics of volume conduction that enable electrophysiological data acquisition also result in the mixing of data sources including possible, undesirable noise sources at the electrode interface. This work specifically focuses on improving the performance of the recursive least-squares (RLS) adaptive filtering method for removing eye movement artifact from the electroencephalogram. In biophysically-inspired simulated data, the RLS algorithm is verified to produce results that are inferior to extended infomax independent component analysis (ICA), the most widely used artifact correction approach in this problem space, due to its non-linear filter phase response and the presence of bidirectional contamination, or cross-talk, resultant …

Anterior Cruciate Ligament Biomechanics, Computational Modeling Of Mechanical Behavior And Injury Risk, Bharadwaj Cheruvu

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Knee joint involves interactions from various structures such as cartilage, bone, muscles, ligaments, tendon, as well as neural control. Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears are one of the most frequent soft tissue injuries of the knee. A torn ACL leaves the joint unstable and at risk for further damage to other soft tissues manifested as pain, dislocation, and osteoarthritis. This injury is quite common in sports such as basketball, soccer and football. Females often tear their ACL 2-8 times more frequently than their male counterparts. An ACL injury can be devastating and significantly increases the athlete's risk for osteoarthritis long …

Signal Subspace Processing In The Beam Space Of A True Time Delay Beamformer Bank, Nathan Allen Wilkins

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A number of techniques for Radio Frequency (RF) source location for wide bandwidth signals have been described that utilize coherent signal subspace processing, but often suffer from limitations such as the requirement for preliminary source location estimation, the need to apply the technique iteratively, computational expense or others. This dissertation examines a method that performs subspace processing of the data from a bank of true time delay beamformers. The spatial diversity of the beamformer bank alleviates the need for a preliminary estimate while simultaneously reducing the dimensionality of subsequent signal subspace processing resulting in computational efficiency. The pointing direction of …

Inhibition Of Nectin-1 And Herpes Virus Entry Mediator (Hvem) Using Monoclonal Antibodies Decreases Hsv-1 Entry Into Neuro-2a Cells, Erica Marie Rinehart

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This study examines the effects of blocking the nectin-1 and Herpes Virus Entry Mediator (HVEM) receptors on Neuro-2a (N2a) cells in order to prevent HSV-1 infection. These two receptors have been identified as a primary and secondary mode of entry for HSV-1. Since there was some debate about the correct serum level to be used in growth media for healthy N2a cells, three concentrations (2%, 5%, 10%) were used to examine relative growth and neurite development, in addition to examining possible differences in infectivity levels in all other experiments. There was a difference in general morphology, with neurite abundance and …

Assessment Of The Applicability Of Terahertz Spectroscopic Breath Sensing Towards Monitoring Type 1 Diabetic Mellitus, Jessica Rose Thomas

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Type 1 diabetes is a condition that cumulatively costs around $14.9 billion in medical expenses every year in the United States. Besides being costly, the monitoring of this disease is invasive, painful, and often embarrassing to the afflicted individual; blood and urine testing is currently the daily method of monitoring blood glucose and ketone levels in the body of type 1 diabetics. Though the use of these samples is standard, another avenue for possibly determining blood glucose has not been completely explored. With over 3000 chemicals reportedly found in exhaled human breath, biomarkers associated with this disorder and many of …

Non-Cognitive Factors Affecting Undergraduate Student Success In Core Composition Courses, Samantha J. Spitak

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The intention of this study was to determine what, if any, non-cognitive factors affect student performance in core composition courses. "Non-cognitive factor" is a term referring to non-academic and non-intellectual characteristics of a student's experience. These factors may be emotional, environmental, psychosocial, etc. Some prior research has been conducted on non-cognitive factors relating to admission of minority populations, but this research is likely to be outdated. Six potential non-cognitive factors were proposed for this study: Confidence, Motivation, Socioeconomic Class, Emotional Support, Campus Climate, and Living Situation. The results of this study indicated that non-cognitive factors do influence student performance in …

A Distributed Surrogate Methodology For Inverse Most Probable Point Searches In Reliability Based Design Optimization, James Davidson

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Surrogate models are commonly used in place of prohibitively expensive computational models to drive iterative procedures necessary for engineering design and analysis such as global optimization. Additionally, surrogate modeling has been applied to reliability based design optimization which constrains designs to those which provide a satisfactory reliability against failure considering system parameter uncertainties. Through surrogate modeling the analysis time is significantly reduced when the total number of evaluated samples upon which the final model is built is less than the number which would have otherwise been required using the expensive model directly with the analysis algorithm. Too few samples will …

Dna-Nucleobase Guanine As Passivation/Gate Dielectric Layer For Flexible Gfet-Based Sensor Applications, Adrienne Dee Williams

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The main goal of this dissertation was two-fold: first, to study and design a graphene-based transistor environmentally friendly by replacing a standard substrate and gate dielectric with different flexible/rigid and biodegradable films and secondly, to study their effects on graphene's charge carrier mobility. A thin film of deoxyribonucleic acid nucleobase purine guanine deposited by physical vapor deposition onto up to ten layers of graphene that were transferred onto various rigid and flexible substrates was characterized more thoroughly. Several test platforms were fabricated with guanine 1) as a standalone gate dielectric, 2) as the control and 3) as a passivation layer …

Mission-Aware Vulnerability Assessment For Cyber-Physical System, Xiaotian Wang

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Designing secure cyber-physical systems (CPS) is fundamentally important. An indispensable step towards this end is to perform vulnerability assessment. This thesis discusses the design and implementation of a mission-aware CPS vulnerability assessment framework. The framework intends to accomplish three objectives including i) mapping CPS mission into infrastructural components, ii) evaluating global impact of each vulnerability, and iii) achieving verifiable results and high flexibility. In order to accomplish these objectives, a model-based analysis strategy is employed. Specifically, a CPS simulator is used to model dynamic behaviors of CPS components under different missions; the framework facilitates a bottom-up approach to traverse a …

Domain-Specific Document Retrieval Framework For Near Real-Time Social Health Data, Swapnil Soni

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With the advent of web search and microblogging, the percentage of Online Health Information Seekers (OHIS) using these services to share and seek health information in real-time has increased exponentially. Recently, Twitter has emerged as one of the primary mediums for sharing and seeking of the latest information related to a variety of topics, including health information. Although Twitter is an excellent information source, the identification of useful information from the deluge of tweets is one of the major challenges. Twitter search is limited to keyword-based techniques to retrieve information for a given query and sometimes the results do not …

Automatic Emotion Identification From Text, Wenbo Wang

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People's emotions can be gleaned from their text using machine learning techniques to build models that exploit large self-labeled emotion data from social media. Further, the self-labeled emotion data can be effectively adapted to train emotion classifiers in different target domains where training data are sparse.

Emotions are both prevalent in and essential to most aspects of our lives. They influence our decision-making, affect our social relationships and shape our daily behavior. With the rapid growth of emotion-rich textual content, such as microblog posts, blog posts, and forum discussions, there is a growing need to develop algorithms and techniques for …

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Chemistry, Fall 2015, Patti Mccall

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No abstract provided.

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Physics, Fall 2015, Patti Mccall

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No abstract provided.

A Modeling System To Assess Land Cover Land Use Change Effects On Sav Habitat In The Mobile Bay Estuary, Maurice G. Estes Jr., Mohammad Z. Al-Hamdan, Jean T. Ellis, Chaeli Judd, Dana Woodruff, Ronald M. Thom, Dale Quattrochi, Brian Watson, Hugo Rodriguez, Hoyt Johnson Iii, Tom Herder

United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration: Publications

Estuarine ecosystems are largely influenced by watersheds directly connected to them. In the Mobile Bay, Alabama watersheds we examined the effect of land cover and land use (LCLU) changes on discharge rate, water properties, and submerged aquatic vegetation, including freshwater macrophytes and seagrasses, throughout the estuary. LCLU scenarios from 1948, 1992, 2001, and 2030 were used to influence watershed and hydrodynamic models and evaluate the impact of LCLU change on shallow aquatic ecosystems. Overall, our modeling results found that LCLU changes increased freshwater flows into Mobile Bay altering temperature, salinity, and total suspended sediments (TSS). Increased urban land uses coupled …

Biogenic Carbon Fluxes From Global Agricultural Production And Consumption, Julie Wolf, Tristram O. West, Yannick Le Page, G. Page Kyle, Xuesong Zhang, G. James Collatz, Marc L. Imhoff

United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration: Publications

Quantification of biogenic carbon fluxes from agricultural lands is needed to generate comprehensive bottom-up estimates of net carbon exchange for global and regional carbon monitoring. We estimated global agricultural carbon fluxes associated with annual crop net primary production (NPP), harvested biomass, and consumption of biomass by humans and livestock. These estimates were combined for a single estimate of net carbon exchange and spatially distributed to 0.05° resolution usingModerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite land cover data. Global crop NPP in 2011 was estimated at 5.25 ± 0.46 Pg C yr^-1, of which 2.05 ± 0.05 Pg C yr^{-1 …}

Upper Tropospheric Ozone Production From Lightning NoX-Impacted Convection: Smoke Ingestion Case Study From The Dc3 Campaign, E. C. Apel, R. S. Hornbrook, A. J. Hills, N. J. Blake, M. C. Barth, A. Weinheimer, C. Cantrell, S. A. Rutledge, B. Basarab, J. Crawford, G. Diskin, C. R. Homeyer, T. Campos, F. Flocke, A. Fried, D. R. Blake, W. Brune, I. Pollack, J. Peischl, T. Ryerson, P. O. Wennberg, J. D. Crounse, A. Wisthaler, T. Mikoviny, G. Huey, B. Heikes, D. O'Sullivan, D. D. Riemer

United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration: Publications

As part of the Deep Convective Cloud and Chemistry (DC3) experiment, the National Science Foundation/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Gulfstream-V (GV) and NASA DC-8 research aircraft probed the chemical composition of the inflow and outflow of two convective storms (north storm, NS, south storm, SS) originating in the Colorado region on 22 June 2012, a time when the High Park wildfire was active in the area. A wide range of trace species were measured on board both aircraft including biomass burning (BB) tracers hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and acetonitrile (ACN). Acrolein, a much shorter lived tracer for BB, was also …

Probability And Punishment: How To Improve Sentencing By Taking Account Of Probability, Jacob Schuman

Faculty Scholarship

The United States Sentencing Guidelines place little emphasis on probability. Instead, the Guidelines recommend a sentence in each case based only on whether certain facts about the offender’s crime exceed a “threshold” level of likelihood. Guidelines sentences therefore fail to reflect the precise odds of each defendant’s wrongdoing, which makes them both inefficient and unfair. This model of decision-making is particularly problematic in drug sentencing, where judges often impose lengthy sentences based on drug quantity calculations that carry a high risk of error. To address these problems, district courts should exercise their discretion and policymakers should implement reforms that incorporate …

Interdisciplinary Connections Between Science & Theatre, Jessica N. Dotson

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

INTERDISCIPLINARY CONNECTIONS BETWEEN SCIENCE & THEATRE

Jessica Nicole Dotson

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015.

Major Director: Dr. Noreen C. Barnes, Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor of Theatre

In the 1990s, astronomer Peter Usher was searching for new ways to teach his introductory astronomy class at Pennsylvania State University. He began to engage his students by searching for astronomical connections from other disciplines. His focus was turned to the arts, especially the works of William Shakespeare. Usher found, while …

The Use Of Antibody-Coated Latex Beads To Determine Single Positive And Double Positive Mouse Spleen Cells Expressing Cd5 And/Or Cd19 Glycoproteins, Abdulrazzag Abdulaziz Othman

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Flow cytometry is the standard method used to diagnose, stage, and monitor patients' response to the treatment given by counting the numbers of CD5, CD19 and CD5+ CD19+ B lymphocytes. In this study, a comparison was done between numbers of single CD5+, single CD19+ and dual CD5+ CD19+ mouse spleen B lymphocytes using flow cytometry and antibody-latex beads. The bead method involved antibody-coated latex bead and yielded results similar to those of flow cytometry. For cells exhibiting both markers (CD5+ CD19+), the bead method used antibody-coated beads of two different colors yielded similar results to those of flow cytometry results. …