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2016

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Artificial Sweeteners And Weight Gain: Fighting Or Feeding The Obesity Epidemic?, Shanna Frisch Jan 2016

Artificial Sweeteners And Weight Gain: Fighting Or Feeding The Obesity Epidemic?, Shanna Frisch

The Science Journal of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences

Our world has developed an obsession with weight control and, as a result, has begun replacing high calorie foods with low-fat and non-caloric substitutes. Artificial sweeteners are a widely used solution to this growing problem. Though the intention when using artificial sweeteners is to lose weight, studies have shown that the opposite sometimes occurs. Researchers attempt to explain this surprising phenomenon with multiple hypotheses. Lack of appetite suppression and reward response may cause individuals to search for more food and to consume more calories. Artificial sweeteners can also have negative affects on biological mechanisms such as resting metabolic rate, as …

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Mechanism Of Fecal Bacteriotherapy In Treating Clostridium Difficile Infection And Gi Tract Disorders, Rivka Steinberg Jan 2016

Mechanism Of Fecal Bacteriotherapy In Treating Clostridium Difficile Infection And Gi Tract Disorders, Rivka Steinberg

The Science Journal of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences

Clostridium difficile infection, an increasingly prevalent and virulent condition, is often resistant to treatment. Standard antibiotic therapy is rarely efficient when used to treat recurrent C. difficile infection. Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is a safe, effective and inexpensive treatment that has a cure rate of about 90%, according to clinical trials and reports. This approach may also be applicable in treating ulcerative colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease, on the basis of the restoration of flora imbalances. Additionally, recent data suggests that a disproportion in composition of the gut microbiome may contribute to obesity. FMT, may restore a healthy …

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Pesticide Partitioning In Louisiana Wetland Aand Ricefield Sediment, Brendan Michael Marsh Jan 2016

Pesticide Partitioning In Louisiana Wetland Aand Ricefield Sediment, Brendan Michael Marsh

LSU Master's Theses

Pesticides are used globally and are often found within bodies of water. The EPA investigates the potential environmental impact through computer modeling in order to help mitigate some of the regulatory burden of pesticide fate investigation. Currently when pesticides enter a water body, the Exposure Analysis Modeling System (EXAMS) estimates partitioning depth as 5 cm and assumes equal distribution. This assumption was tested with a wide variety of pesticides with varying Koc ranges and water solubilities. Savillex 150 ml Teflon tubes were filled with wetland and ricefield sediments with fresh and seawater as the aqueous phase. The seven pesticides tested …

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Using Tourmaline As An Indicator Of Provenance: Development And Application Of A Statistical Approach Using Random Forests, Erin Lael Walden Jan 2016

Using Tourmaline As An Indicator Of Provenance: Development And Application Of A Statistical Approach Using Random Forests, Erin Lael Walden

LSU Master's Theses

Tourmaline is a petrologic indicator mineral that is the major repository of boron in the earth’s crust. It forms readily when boron is present, accommodating multiple cations and anions with multiple possible substitutions for each site in the crystal structure. It is stable over a wide variety of pressures and temperatures, from near-surface P/T conditions to greater than 950 C and 7 GPa. It records information about conditions of formation, as well as pressure and temperature. Due to its resistance to chemical or physical weathering, and the negligible diffusion of elements in the crystal lattice, information about provenance is preserved. …

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Inmate Populations In A Disaster: A Labor Force, A Vulnerable Population, And A Hazard, Jordan Carlee Smith Jan 2016

Inmate Populations In A Disaster: A Labor Force, A Vulnerable Population, And A Hazard, Jordan Carlee Smith

LSU Master's Theses

Within the disaster literature, few studies have been devoted to the role of incarcerated populations as a source of labor within the context of emergency operations. When faced with a lack of resources, emergency management rely on inmate labor forces to prepare for and respond to hazards and disasters. In the U.S., inmates from the Louisiana State Penitentiary helped with sandbagging the facilities in preparing for the potentially flooding of the Mississippi River and Hurricane Katrina (Gaillard, 2012). The state of California has long maintained inmate firefighting forces to combat destructive wildfires statewide (Goodman, 2012). However, there has never been …

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Hydrodynamic Modeling Of Newly Emergent Coastal Deltaic Floodplains, Alexandra Christensen Jan 2016

Hydrodynamic Modeling Of Newly Emergent Coastal Deltaic Floodplains, Alexandra Christensen

LSU Master's Theses

Coastal deltaic floodplains provide an important ecosystem service by removing or retaining nitrate from enriched riverine water. Wetland plants, soils, and microbes within these floodplains use nitrate through uptake, burial, and denitrification, thereby reducing the impact of nitrate on algal blooms and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. However, these processes depend on the physical, biological, and chemical conditions within the floodplain. Understanding and characterizing the hydrodynamics of these systems and the relative impact of river, tide, and wind forcings are the first steps in understanding the biogeochemical processes controlling nitrate removal. Motivated by the desire to identify biogeochemical hotspots …

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Transatlantic Trade And Investment Partnership: Implications To Global Wine Market, Natalia Antosova Jan 2016

Transatlantic Trade And Investment Partnership: Implications To Global Wine Market, Natalia Antosova

LSU Master's Theses

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was first introduced in 2013, with the goal of liberalization of the trade and investments, better coordination of trade by specific regulations, enhancing intellectual property protection and lifting government’s impediments to trade. This Thesis is concerned on potential implications of the TTIP on the wine industry in the European Union and particular consequences related to EU wine producers. The literature review of this paper is developed with the purpose to bring general knowledge in the matter of the TTIP. In addition, linkages of the TTIP with the political economy are provided in the latter part …

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Successful Aging In Oldest-Old Adults: Role Of Physical And Social Factors, Katie Elizabeth Stanko Jan 2016

Successful Aging In Oldest-Old Adults: Role Of Physical And Social Factors, Katie Elizabeth Stanko

LSU Master's Theses

Successful aging, increasing in chronological age while maintaining health, is related to a multitude of factors including social and physical behaviors. Older adults may report that they are aging successfully while biomedical outcomes suggest otherwise. In the present study, sociodemographic characteristics, social engagement, physical activity in relation to frailty and health-related quality of life (HR QoL) were examined using a lifespan sample of adults (N = 732) from the Louisiana Healthy Aging Study (LHAS). Four age groups were compared: younger (21-44 years), middle-aged (45-64 years), older (65-84 years), and oldest-old adults (85 to 101 years). A main effect of age …

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Decolonizing World History: Mis-Representations Of The Middle East In Secondary Social Studies Textbooks, Amanda Megan Schellhaas Jan 2016

Decolonizing World History: Mis-Representations Of The Middle East In Secondary Social Studies Textbooks, Amanda Megan Schellhaas

LSU Master's Theses

This study utilizes content analysis to evaluate three United States High School World History textbook’s coverage of the Middle East since 1945 in order to determine if an authentic global approach to history is being utilized. This was determined by analyzing the amount of coverage that was dedicated to the Middle East, the focus of the narrative, and the portrayal of the Middle East. Analysis of the narrative content of the texts showed that coverage of the Middle East overall did not receive an equitable representation in comparison to other regions. The focus of this coverage centered on defining the …

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Developing And Characterization Of Catfish Skin Hydrolysates Including Antioxidant And Antimicrobial Properties, Cesar Augusto Galindo Perez Jan 2016

Developing And Characterization Of Catfish Skin Hydrolysates Including Antioxidant And Antimicrobial Properties, Cesar Augusto Galindo Perez

LSU Master's Theses

Catfish skin (CS) contains considerable amount of protein that may be hydrolyzed enzymatically to generate hydrolysates (CSH) which may have antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. The generation of natural compounds with these properties is of special interest to the food industry. The objective of this study was to develop and characterize CSH including antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. CSH were produced from different enzymatic reaction periods using alkaline protease, and their characterization, antioxidant, antimicrobial, and some functional properties were evaluated. A selected CSH was analyzed for peptide composition and partial amino acid sequences. The color analysis showed that darker, more yellow, and …

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Strategic Use Of Language In White House Twitter Communications, Margo L. Jolet Jan 2016

Strategic Use Of Language In White House Twitter Communications, Margo L. Jolet

LSU Master's Theses

Lippmann (1922) theorized that we understand our world through elites and the media because we cannot experience everything ourselves. We look to others to share their experiences with us. In this way, the media and elites tell us what is important in our world. Converse (1964), Zaller (1992), and Lupia (1994) argue that not only do elites and the media help us see what is important, but they draw out attributes of these issues to help us make political determinations congruent with our belief systems. In this thesis, I conduced two studies investigating candidate, party, and White House tweets about …

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Characterization Of Thermoplastic Fusion Bonding Of Microchannels Using Pressure Assisted Boiling Point Control System, Kavya Dathathreya Jan 2016

Characterization Of Thermoplastic Fusion Bonding Of Microchannels Using Pressure Assisted Boiling Point Control System, Kavya Dathathreya

LSU Master's Theses

An innovative method of thermoplastic fusion bonding using a pressure assisted boiling point control (PABP) system was characterized to determine the optimum parameters for bonding polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) components containing microchannels and thin, 250 µm cover sheets. The PABP system enables precise control of the temperature boundary condition and the applied pressure by immersing the components being bonded in boiling water and varying the vapor pressure. Test structure geometries containing microchannels of two depths and four different aspect ratios were designed: 1:10 (Depth: 10µm, Width: 100 µm and Depth: 5µm, Width: 50 µm), 1:50 (Depth: 10µm, Width: 500µm and Depth: …

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Hydrodynamic Simulations Of The Prototype Mississippi River And Expanded Small-Scale Physical Model To Investigate Impact Of Sea Level Rise, Linsey Brooke Olivier Jan 2016

Hydrodynamic Simulations Of The Prototype Mississippi River And Expanded Small-Scale Physical Model To Investigate Impact Of Sea Level Rise, Linsey Brooke Olivier

LSU Master's Theses

The Expanded Small-Scale Physical Model (ESSPM) is a distorted-scale, moveable bed model that will complement numerical and field studies studying management strategies in the lower ~140 miles of the Mississippi River and their effect on flooding, navigation and coastal restoration. It is recognized that relative sea level rise (RSLR), the combination of eustatic sea level rise (ESLR) and subsidence, will have an impact on the hydraulics and sediment transport in the lower River. However, it is physically impossible to replicate subsidence in the ESSPM; thus, future RSLR conditions will be experimentally simulated by raising Gulf of Mexico (GoM) levels commensurate …

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New Archiving, Fingering, And Assessing Techniques For Sheet Music Using Advanced Signal Processing Approaches, Ting-Chen Hsu Jan 2016

New Archiving, Fingering, And Assessing Techniques For Sheet Music Using Advanced Signal Processing Approaches, Ting-Chen Hsu

LSU Master's Theses

In this thesis, advanced signal processing techniques are proposed to archive the musical scores, guide the novice pianists to play piano with appropriate fingerings, and assess the harmonization for musical composition. The mathematical frameworks for these three applications are established and the corresponding optimization problems are formulated. The optimal solutions are also provided. First, the hard- and soft-archiving approaches for storing and distributing musical scores are investigated. By use of the popular musical scripting language, LilyPond, as the intermediate data format, we propose to encode the LilyPond script, which is converted from the original musical score, to the two-dimensional quick-response …

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Spatial Biodegradation Of Mc252 Crude Oil On A Coastal Headland Beach, Zachary Joseph Romaine Jan 2016

Spatial Biodegradation Of Mc252 Crude Oil On A Coastal Headland Beach, Zachary Joseph Romaine

LSU Master's Theses

Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April, 2010, hard structures were constructed to deter oil migration into sensitive marsh areas behind Fourchon Beach, LA These hard structures created conditions for accumulation and burial of oil across an 8 foot deep beach vertical profile. Buried oil persists in these areas due to anaerobic conditions of beach groundwater. The objectives of this thesis are to compare the rate and extent of biodegradation of 3-ring PAHs in crude oil deposits from the surface and subsurface, and to investigate effects on beach groundwater after introduction of O2. Field samples were removed from 2011-2016 …

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Weld Quality Classification From Sensory Signatures In Friction-Stir-Welding (Fsw) Using Discrete Wavelet Transform And Advanced Metaheuristic Techniques, James Devecmon Roberts Jan 2016

Weld Quality Classification From Sensory Signatures In Friction-Stir-Welding (Fsw) Using Discrete Wavelet Transform And Advanced Metaheuristic Techniques, James Devecmon Roberts

LSU Master's Theses

Controlling the quality of welds is an essential part of high quality fabrications and ensuring structural integrity of welded joints and welded structures. Industry is in an endless pursuit to find more cost effective methods of testing welds for defects and eliminating them entirely. This Study contributes to this goal by investigating a new system with the ability to monitor welding conditions during the forging process. Monitoring the condition of the weld, while the metals are joined together is faster and more cost- effective than conventional methods of post-weld defect detection. In this study, the feedback signals are first collected …

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A Comparison Between Functional And Traditional Interface Displays In Support Of Console Operator Performance And Workload, Sophie Lynn Schwartz Jan 2016

A Comparison Between Functional And Traditional Interface Displays In Support Of Console Operator Performance And Workload, Sophie Lynn Schwartz

LSU Master's Theses

In the petrochemical industry, schematic interfaces have been traditionally used as the main interface for console operators to monitor activities. There is limited research in this industry investigating alternative interface types to better support console operator’s decisions during alarm management. Furthermore, even less of that research includes eye-tracking as a measure for console operator situation awareness (SA). This research aimed to investigate an alternative interface, called a functional interface, in its level of support of console operator situation awareness, accuracy, subjective workload, and average response time. Additionally, eye-tracking was incorporated to explore its value as measure for situation awareness on …

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Initial Development And Validation Of The Student Wellbeing Teacher-Report Scales, Anthony Joseph Roberson Jan 2016

Initial Development And Validation Of The Student Wellbeing Teacher-Report Scales, Anthony Joseph Roberson

LSU Master's Theses

Given that youth mental health is associated with their success in school and in life more broadly, it is important that school-based psychological service providers embrace best-practice prevention and intervention strategies that target mental health when working with student populations. One line of study in this area has begun exploring the incorporation of a dual-factor model of mental health within universal screening systems in schools. The dual-factor model is differentiated from the traditional unidimensional mental health model, which focuses on the presence or absence of psychopathology, by conceptualizing mental health alternatively as consisting of both psychopathology and wellbeing dimensions. The …

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Option Volatility & Arbitrage Opportunities, Mikael Boffetti Jan 2016

Option Volatility & Arbitrage Opportunities, Mikael Boffetti

LSU Master's Theses

This paper develops several methods to estimate a future volatility of a stock in order to correctly price corresponding stock options. The pricing model known as Black-Scholes-Merton is presented with a constant volatility parameter and compares it to stochastic volatility models. It mathematically describes the probability distribution of the underlying stock price changes implied by the models and the consequences. Arbitrage opportunities between stock options of various maturities or strike prices are explained from the volatility smile and volatility term structure.

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Driver Engagement In Secondary Tasks: Behavioral Analysis And Crash Risk Assessment, Mengqiu Ye Jan 2016

Driver Engagement In Secondary Tasks: Behavioral Analysis And Crash Risk Assessment, Mengqiu Ye

LSU Master's Theses

Distracted driving has long been acknowledged as one of the leading causes of death or injury in roadway crashes. The focus of past research has been mainly on the change in driving performance due to distracted driving. However, only a few studies attempted to predict the type of distraction based on driving performance measures. In addition, past studies have proven that driving performance is influenced by the drivers’ socioeconomic characteristics, while not many studies have attempted to quantify that influence. In essence, this study utilizes the rich SHRP 2 Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) database to (a) develop a model for …

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An Examination Of Autism Symptomatology In Young Children With Family History Of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Jasper Abarte Estabillo Jan 2016

An Examination Of Autism Symptomatology In Young Children With Family History Of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Jasper Abarte Estabillo

LSU Master's Theses

Multiple genetic and environmental factors have roles in the etiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Thus, researchers have become increasingly interested in studying family members of individuals with ASD in order to examine possible risk factors and to identify early markers of the disorder. While family history of ASD may put an individual at risk for developing autism, there is limited research examining how the degree of relationship to the affected individual may be related to an individual’s presenting ASD symptomatology. Because closer familial relationships (i.e., first-degree relatives) have more shared genetic material and tend to have increased common environment …

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Everglades Mangrove Forest Response To Large-Scale Disturbance: Long-Term Assessment Of Structural And Functional Properties, Tess Marie Danielson Jan 2016

Everglades Mangrove Forest Response To Large-Scale Disturbance: Long-Term Assessment Of Structural And Functional Properties, Tess Marie Danielson

LSU Master's Theses

The impact (i.e., defoliation and mortality) associated with large-scale natural disturbance events is capable of significantly altering ecosystem structure (e.g., biomass) and function (e.g., productivity) in mangrove wetlands. These pulsing events provide an opportunity to assess ecosystem resilience (i.e., recovery to pre-disturbance conditions) by evaluating the immediate and long-term ecosystem response trajectory (i.e., disturbance magnitude, recovery time). I hypothesized that 1) there are specific properties of disturbance that can be characterized and fit to a general forest disturbance model, and that 2) a mangrove forest recovery trajectory (i.e. recovery duration and rate) is dependent on the disturbance magnitude and initial …

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Reentering Survivors: Invisible At The Intersection Of The Criminal Legal System And The Domestic Violence Movement, Courtney Cross Jan 2016

Reentering Survivors: Invisible At The Intersection Of The Criminal Legal System And The Domestic Violence Movement, Courtney Cross

Scholarly Works

Like all returning citizens, women coming home after incarceration face significant challenges to successful reentry. In addition to the collateral consequences of their criminal convictions, reentering women also encounter uniquely gendered obstacles. This Article explores one such obstacle: the relationship between women's reentry and domestic violence. Women on probation or parole who are also experiencing domestic violence too often fall into a blind spot in which the structure of community supervision pressures them to remain in unsafe homes and also punishes them when the abuse they endure interferes with their ability to comply with the conditions of their release. Because …

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Constructing The Search Template: Episodic And Semantic Influences On Categorical Template Formation, Juan D. Guevara Pinto Jan 2016

Constructing The Search Template: Episodic And Semantic Influences On Categorical Template Formation, Juan D. Guevara Pinto

LSU Master's Theses

Search efficiency is usually improved by presenting observers with highly detailed target cues (e.g., pictures). However, in the absence of accurate target cues, observers must rely only on categorical information to find targets. Models of visual search suggest that guidance in a categorical search results from matching categorically-diagnostic target features in the search display to a top-down attentional set (i.e., the search template), but the mechanisms by which such attentional set is constructed have not been specified. The present investigation examined the influences of both semantic and episodic memory on search template formation. More precisely, the present study tested whether …

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Expandable Proppants For Hydraulic Fracturing, Livio Yang Santos Jan 2016

Expandable Proppants For Hydraulic Fracturing, Livio Yang Santos

LSU Master's Theses

Hydraulic fracturing is recognized as the primary technique to achieve economic oil and gas production from low permeability reservoirs like shale and tight-sand formations. One of the main challenges facing the oil and gas industry is maintaining the proppant functionality in the subsurface where replacement of proppant is only possible by expensive refracturing operations. Proppant crushing and proppant embedment have posed challenges for sustainable production from stimulated wells especially in soft and deep formations like Haynesville Shales. Experimental measurements show the strong impact of proppant stress and proppant embedment on reducing fracture conductivity. In this work, we introduce a new …

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Enhancing Program Soft Error Resilience Through Algorithmic Approaches, Sui Chen Jan 2016

Enhancing Program Soft Error Resilience Through Algorithmic Approaches, Sui Chen

LSU Master's Theses

The rising count and shrinking feature size of transistors within modern computers is making them increasingly vulnerable to various types of soft faults. This problem is especially acute in high-performance computing (HPC) systems used for scientific computing, because these systems include many thousands of compute cores and nodes, all of which may be utilized in a single large-scale run. The increasing vulnerability of HPC applications to errors induced by soft faults is motivating extensive work on techniques to make these applications more resilient to such faults, ranging from generic techniques such as replication or checkpoint/restart to algorithm-specific error detection and …

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The Attentional Mechanisms Of Active Forgetting, Laura Lee Heisick Jan 2016

The Attentional Mechanisms Of Active Forgetting, Laura Lee Heisick

LSU Master's Theses

Recent work has shown that intentional forgetting of distracting, erroneous, or irrelevant information aids memory, and relies on active, effortful processes. Two experiments investigated the underlying attentional mechanisms that are active during directed forgetting (DF). Across both experiments, participants completed a modified item-method DF task, in which they received memory instructions to remember or forget individual images for a subsequent memory test. Participants studied items associated with remember or forget instructions before they were shown a subliminal presentation of target items. Finally, participants responded to probes by identifying briefly shown letters to assess how attention and item identity information are …

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What’S Art Got To Do With It?: A Rebellious Lawyer Mindset In Transactional Practice, Patience A. Crowder Jan 2016

What’S Art Got To Do With It?: A Rebellious Lawyer Mindset In Transactional Practice, Patience A. Crowder

Scholarly Works

The geography and demographics of poverty have changed significantly over the last 20 years to trigger a national conversation about race and class and inequality. This conversation compels the need to examine anew the pervasiveness of race and class discrimination- in both traditionally obvious and nonobvious settings. Calling on rebellious lawyering principles, this Article recognizes that the comprehensive examination of questions of inequality requires the consideration and exploration of remedies that extend beyond the realm of litigation to contemplate transactional advocacy in the public interest-and presents a rebellious lawyer mindset in transactional practice.

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Applying Deep Learning Techniques To The Analysis Of Android Apks, Robin Andrew Nix Jan 2016

Applying Deep Learning Techniques To The Analysis Of Android Apks, Robin Andrew Nix

LSU Master's Theses

Malware targeting mobile devices is a pervasive problem in modern life and as such tools to detect and classify malware are of great value. This paper seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of Deep Learning Techniques, specifically Convolutional Neural Networks, in detecting and classifying malware targeting the Android operating system. Unlike many current detection techniques, which require the use of relatively rigid features to aid in detection, deep neural networks are capable of automatically learning flexible features which may be more resilient to obfuscation. We present a parsing for extracting sequences of API calls which can be used to describe a …

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“What Credit Is That To You?” The Social Context Of Moneylending In Medieval England A Comparative Study 1340-1509, Elizabeth Ann Green Jan 2016

“What Credit Is That To You?” The Social Context Of Moneylending In Medieval England A Comparative Study 1340-1509, Elizabeth Ann Green

LSU Master's Theses

This study makes use of the manorial court rolls of Dyffryn Clwyd, a cantref in Northern Wales, and the certificates of debt from London to examine the lives of two medieval usurers, Ieuan Kery and Sir William Capell, between the years 1340 to 1352 , and 1478 to 1509 . By examining the life of these two individuals who both operated one of the rarest, most socially complex occupations of his place and time, this study begins to expose the ways in which usury helped to shape the fabric of late Medieval culture in the British Isles. The singular focus …

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