Digital Commons Network^™

Meade County - Place Names, Robert M. Rennick

Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection

Place names of Meade County, Kentucky.

Washington Law Review, Vol. 91, 2016, Index, Anon

Washington Law Review

Consists of indexes by author, title, and subject.

A Different Approach To Project Management: The Use Of Soft Skills, Hannah Adams

Dissertations and Theses

The term soft skills is traditionally used to describe interpersonal and subjective skills such as leadership, communication, and emotional intelligence. This paper addresses a further explanation of soft skills, their relation to project management, project management education, and the highlighted differences between a transactional leader and a transformational leader. Project management has often been defined as the making of schedules/tasks; but more importantly providing the inspiration, motivation, and facilitator of great minds to produce innovative ideas. Because of the sheer necessity for human interaction within the project management profession, soft skills are of crucial concern. Although mastering soft skills is …

Rhetorical Analysis Of Monsanto, Kyle J. Brannon

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Rhetoric, and therefore persuasion, can be utilized to impact society in profound ways. These communication devices can also be used for more sinister and nefarious purposes that can leave black marks on any society’s history. For the purpose of this rhetorical analysis, I thoroughly investigated three artifacts used by the Monsanto Corporation. This project attempts to show how Monsanto utilizes rhetoric and persuasion to convince consumers their products are safe to purchase, although there is no scientific consensus regarding that safety to humans and the environment. Through an examination of these artifacts, I was able to examine how Monsanto used …

The Eco-Smart Can, Darack B. Nanto

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I noticed that maintenance workers had the same itinerary when emptying trashcans, meanwhile some trashcans needed to be emptied urgently. Traditionally, ETSU maintenance operate on daily routes to pick trash on designated time, regardless the level of the containers. The time, resources and labor invested in collecting the trash could be saved. Therefore, I decided to use the Internet of Things (IoT) to create a device that will optimize trash collection, to reduce costs and pollution.

Pluralizing The "Sharing" Economy, Erez Aloni

Washington Law Review

The so-called “sharing” economy presents one of the most important and controversial regulatory dilemmas of our time—yet, surprisingly, it remains undertheorized. This Article supplies needed analysis. Specifically, the Article offers a regulatory model that distinguishes between two separate kinds of transactions: conventional economic transactions and those that rely on temporary access to goods and services that would otherwise go underutilized (what I call “access-to-excess” transactions). The regulatory regime that this Article proposes would distinguish between true access-to-excess transactions and conventional transactions. The model is rooted in a version of pluralist theory that posits that the state is responsible for cultivating …

Analysis Of Hiv Diversity In Hiv-Infected Black Men Who Have Sex With Men (Hptn 061), Iris Chen, Gordon Chau, Jing Wang, William Clarke, Mark A. Marzinke, Manya Magnus, +14 Additional Authors

Epidemiology Faculty Publications

Background

HIV populations often diversify in response to selective pressures, such as the immune response and antiretroviral drug use. We analyzed HIV diversity in Black men who have sex with men who were enrolled in the HIV Prevention Trials Network 061 study.

Methods

A high resolution melting (HRM) diversity assay was used to measure diversity in six regions of the HIV genome: two in gag, one in pol, and three in env. HIV diversity was analyzed for 146 men who were HIV infected at study enrollment, including three with acute infection and 13 with recent infection (identified …

Formulating A Covenant Of Discipleship For The Membership Of The Gwinnett Church Of Christ, David Chisholm

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This project addressed the lack of a covenant of discipleship for the membership of the Gwinnett Church of Christ (GCC). The purpose of the project was to develop such a covenant document to help all the members of GCC better live out the process of becoming more like Jesus. To provide a theological foundation for this project, I explored discipleship in the exhortation sections of the book of Hebrews, which specifically addresses the need for greater commitment and intentionality amongst a community of faith. I also explored the theoretical framework of how formulating a discipleship covenant document could create progress …

The Case Against Free Speech, Brian Leiter

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Plain Language Court, David A. Strauss

Articles

No abstract provided.

Predicting Human Behavior Based On Survey Response Patterns Using Markov And Hidden Markov Models, Arun Kumar Pokharna

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

With technological advancements in World Wide Web (www), connecting with people for gathering information has become common. Among several ways, surveys are one of the most commonly used way of collecting information from people. Given a specific objective, multiple surveys are conducted to collect various pieces of information. This collected information, in the form of survey responses, can be categorical values or a descriptive text that represents information regarding the survey question. If additional details regarding the response behavior, scenario in which survey is being responded, or survey outcomes is available, machine learning and prediction modeling can be used to …

Linchpin: A Yaml Template Based Cross Cloud Resource Provisioning Tool, Samvaran Kashyap Rallabandi

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

A cloud application developed, will have a specific requirement of particular cloud resources and software stack to be deployed to make it run. Resource templates enable the environment design and deployment required for an application. A template describes the infrastructure of the cloud application in a text file which includes servers, floating/public IP, storage volumes, etc. This approach is termed “Infrastructure as a code.” In Amazon public cloud, OpenStack private cloud, Google cloud these templates are called as cloud formation templates, HOT (Heat orchestration templates), Google cloud templates respectively. Though the existing template systems give a flexibility for the end …

Feature Selection Using An Extended Piecewise Linear Orthonormal Floating Search, Rohit Rawat

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The piecewise linear orthonormal floating search (PLOFS) is a wrapper method for feature selection that uses a piecewise linear network (PLN) to evaluate candidate subsets. PLOFS has difficulty working on high dimensional data due to overfitting and poor clustering in the PLN subset evaluation function (SEF), and high computational complexity. The presence of noise features aggravates these problems. In order to improve upon the SEF used by PLOFS we mapped the PLN to a SPLN. Then a second order embedded feature selection was used to generate improved distance measure weights. Next, a second order method for positioning center vectors was …

Cloud Hopper: A Unified Cloud Solution To Manage Heterogeneous Clouds, Shraddha Jain

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Cloud environments are built on virtualization platforms which offer scalability, on-demand pricing, high performance, elasticity, easy accessibility of the resources and cost efficient services. Most of the small and large businesses use cloud computing to take advantage of these features. The usage of the cloud resources depends on the requirements of the organizations. With the advent of cloud computing, the traditional way of handling machines by the IT professionals has decreased. However, it leads to wastage of resources due to inadequate monitoring and improper management of resources. Often it happens that the cloud resources once deployed are forgotten, and they …

Mavroomie: An End-To-End Architecture For Finding Compatible Roommates Based On User Preferences, Vijendra Bhogadi

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Team Formation is widely studied in literature as a method for forming teams or groups under certain constraints. However, very few works address the aspect of collaboration while forming groups under certain constraints. Motivated by the collaborative team formation, we try to extend the problem of team formation to a general problem in the real world scenario of finding compatible roommates to share a place. There are numerous applications like “roommates.com" ,”roomiematch.com" , “Roomi” which try to find roommates based on geographical and cost factors and ignore the important human factors which can play a substantial role in finding a …

Searching And Classifying Mobile Application Screenshots, Adis Kovacevic

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Searching for a particular application layout image is a challenging task. No search provider gives an adequate method to filter the query results to the look of a mobile application. Searching for a particular style of application requires lots of manual time sifting through the results returned. Search engines such as Google are too broad and return too many unrelated results without providing sufficient filters on things like category or layout type. This paper proposes a technique that would allow the searching and classifying of mobile application screenshots based on the layout of the content, the category of the application, …

Convolutional And Recurrent Neural Networks For Pedestrian Detection, Vivek Arvind Balaji

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Pedestrian Detection in real time has become an interesting and a challenging problem lately. With the advent of autonomous vehicles and intelligent traffic monitoring systems, more time and money are being invested into detecting and locating pedestrians for their safety and towards achieving complete autonomy in vehicles. For the task of pedestrian detection, Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have been very promising over the past decade. ConvNets have a typical feed-forward structure and they share many properties with the visual system of the human brain. On the other hand, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are emerging as an important technique for image …

Learning Perception To Action Mapping For Functional Imitation, Bhupender Singh

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Imitation leaning is the learning of advanced behavior whereby an agent acquires a skill by observing another's behavior while performing the same skill. The main objective of imitation learning is to make robots usable for a variety of tasks without programming them but by simply demonstrating new tasks. The power of this approach arises since end users of such robots will frequently not know how to program the robot, might not understand the dynamics and behavioral capabilities of the system, and might not know how to program these robots to get different/new tasks done. Some challenges in achieving imitation capabilities …

Improving Memorization And Long Term Recall Of System Assigned Passwords, Jayesh Doolani

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Systems assigned password have guaranteed robustness against guessing attacks, but they are hard to memorize. To make system assigned passwords more usable, it is of prime importance that systems that assign random password also assist users with memorization and recall. In this work, we have designed a novel technique that employs rote memorization inform of an engaging game, which is played during the account registration process. Based on prior work on chunking, we break a password into three equal chunks, and then the game helps plant those chunks in memory. We present the findings of 17 participant user-study, where we …

A Framework For Employing Femtosatellites In Planetary Science Missions, Including A Proposed Mission Concept For Titan, Tracie Renea Conn Perez

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Over the past 15 years, there has been a growing interest in femtosatellites, a class of tiny satellites having mass less than 100 grams. Research groups from Peru, Spain, England, Canada, and the United States have proposed femtosat designs and novel mission concepts for them. In fact, Peru made history in 2013 by releasing the first – and still only – femtosat tracked from LEO. However, femtosatellite applications in interplanetary missions have yet to be explored in detail. An interesting operations concept would be for a space probe to release numerous femtosatellites into orbit around a planetary object of interest, …

Pilot Demonstration Based Reinforcement Learning With Application To Low Speed Airship Control, Onur Daskiran

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Designing control systems for airship has unique challenges as compared to conventional aircraft. Highly nonlinear dynamics, different mass/inertia relations, vast uncertainties in the model parameters and underactuation are the main reasons behind this. Airship dynamics is greatly influenced by the variations in the environmental (e.g.,room temperature) and internal (e.g., helium distribution in envelope) factors that can completely change the response characteristics of the blimp and make it infeasible for a model-based controller to perform. On the other hand, a skilled RC pilot can operate the manual flight easily under these conditions. This makes LfD (learning from demonstration) and RL (reinforcement …

System Health Monitoring Using Multiple-Model Adaptive Estimation Techniques, Stanley Ryan Sifford

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Monitoring system health for fault detection and diagnosis by tracking system parameters concurrently with state estimates is approached using a new multiple-model adaptive estimation (MMAE) method. This novel method is called GRid-based Adaptive Parameter Estimation (GRAPE). GRAPE expands existing MMAE methods by using new techniques to sample the parameter space. GRAPE expands on MMAE with the hypothesis that sample models can be applied and resampled without relying on a predefined set of models. GRAPE is initially implemented in a linear framework using Kalman filter models. A more generalized GRAPE formulation is presented using extended Kalman filter (EKF) models to represent …

Numerical Modeling Of Capillary Driven Microfluidic Flow, Md Ashraful Islam

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Capillary driven two dimensional axisymmetric and three dimensional asymmetric flow in various microfluidic applications have been modeled and analyzed numerically. The transient Navier-Stokes equations are solved using a finite-difference formulation with a two-step projection method on a fixed grid. The vapor-liquid interface of the micro-droplet is tracked by volume-of-fluid (VOF) and coupled level set and volume-of-fluid (CLSVOF) methods with the surface tension force determined by the continuum surface force (CSF) model. The static contact angle at the three phase contact line has been modeled using wall adhesion scheme within the CSF framework. The developed numerical method for capturing the microfluidic …

Finite Element Modeling And Stress Distribution Of Unidirectional Composite Materials Under Transversal Loading, Pavan Agarwal

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Micromechanics of Composites analyze stresses inside any heterogeneous material. These stresses can not only be used for calculation of effective stiffness or compliance, but also for predicting strength and failure modes for these materials. This thesis is devoted to the stress analysis of unidirectional composites by finite element method. The key distinction from other finite element method modeling of the unidirectional composite was that the load on the cell was not prescribed, but was to be calculated taking into account the influence of the closest neighbors of the cell. Transversal unidirectional tension/compression and transversally symmetrical biaxial tension/compression were analyzed. In …

Evaluation Of Water Consumption And Savings Achieved In Datacenters Through Air Side Economization, Ravi Mishra

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Recent researches and a few facility owners have focused on eliminating the chiller plant altogether by implementing ‘Evaporative Cooling’, as an alternative or augmentation to compressor-based air conditioning since the energy consumption is dominated by the compressor work (around 41%) in the chiller plant. Because evaporative cooling systems consume water, when evaluating the energy savings potential of these systems, it is imperative to consider not just their impacts on electricity use, but also their impacts on water consumption as well since Joe Kava, Google’s head of data center operations, was quoted as saying that water is the “big elephant in …

Automated System For The Characterization Of The Biomechanical Properties Of Human Soft Tissue, Michael R. Abraham

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Vaginal prolapse is a common condition that affects a large number (approximately 3.3 million in the US) of women, mainly above the age of 50 years. The condition is characterized by the weakening and breakdown of the pelvic support structures such as muscles and connective tissues, leading to the dislodging and prolapse of pelvic organs. Current examinations of the pelvic tissue are manually performed by the physician who assesses its rigidity. These exams are subjective and offer qualitative rather than quantitative results of the state of the pelvic tissue. In this research, a complete system was conceptualized and designed to …

A Methodology To Develop A Control System App For Data Center Cooling, Varun Rahul

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management), are tools that are available in the industry to serve the purpose of controlling different parameters in the data center. But their cost is significantly high. The idea of developing a tool that is easily accessible at highly competitive costs will be the USP for its development. While developing such a software tool, there will be a few points that will be thoroughly emphasized upon: The software tool will have the flexibility of being used on any Operating System. It will be portable i.e. it can be set up on any device that supports a …

Interactive Analysis Of General Beam Configurations Using Finite Element Methods And Javascript, Christopher G. Hernandez

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Advancements in computer technology have contributed to the widespread practice of modelling and solving engineering problems through the use of specialized software. The wide use of engineering software comes with the disadvantage to the user of costs from the required purchase of software licenses. The creation of accurate, trusted, and freely available applications capable of conducting meaningful analysis of engineering problems is a way to mitigate to the costs associated with every-day engineering computations. Writing applications in the JavaScript programming language allows the applications to run within any computer browser, without the need to install specialized software, since all internet …

Slicing Algorithm For Complex Contour Generation From Coarse Meshed Iso-Surface Data, Divya Hareshkumar Shukla

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Finite element based topology optimization is used to develop complex geometric configurations for additive manufacturing. Complex coarse-meshed Iso-surface data is extracted from topology optimization results and smooth mathematical geometry must be fit to that data in order to accomplish further design development. To accomplish this geometry fitting, cross-section data must be extracted at specific locations. The stereo lithography (STL) file format is a triangular mesh format which can be developed using 3D CAD Software and is widely used for additive layer manufacturing processes. The main aim of this research work is to generate cross-section contours using a nearest tail-to-head distance …

Computational Study And Optimization Of Wet Cooling Media In Direct Evaporative Heat Exchanger, Tejas Vijay Bhongale

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Evaporative cooling media pads are the primary component of importance in direct evaporative cooling units. To increase the overall efficiency of direct evaporative cooling systems, a wet cooling media pad is considered for further optimization in design and operation. An installation technique called ‘staging’ of cooling media pads is examined and evaluated for its incremental cooling, water usage, and operational cooling efficiency. For Staging, a cooling media is divided into multiple vertical sections, and separate water distribution headers control each part. Staging of cooling media can reduce water consumption in data centers and potentially lessen the amount of cooling media …